When President Donald Trump didn’t tweet out pictures of himself dressed as Jesus Christ, deface the Oval Office with gold brocade, threaten to destroy the White House on the taxpayer dime with a vulgar ballroom, overhaul buildings, namely the Kennedy Center to bear his own name, start a war with Iran he can’t finish, which included the bombing of a girls’ school, killing up to 168 people, unleash masked men with guns into the streets to kill Americans, enrich himself and his family through cryptocurrency while gutting healthcare, education and energy funding, try to kill the urgently needed Gateway Tunnel, champion the rollback of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, attempt to nationalize elections in defiance of state control, hike the price of gas to $4.50 a gallon, exacerbate economic security while saying he doesn’t care, pack the courts with lackeys who refuse to acknowledge that Trump lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, try to cover up the Epstein Files, and whine like a spoiled toddler every time a reporter he doesn’t like asks a question, he found some other way to be the incompetent 21st Century embodiment of Nebuchadnezzar (I would say the Emperor Nero but I have a friend who lives in Rome who says she finds the comparison deeply offensive to the memory of Nero).
All that said and desperately underwater in New Jersey, Trump miraculously still has 26% of the Garden State voting population who say they have a favorable impression of him. That gives him a ten-point plummet ramp to get to where then-Governor Chris Christie once resided in the public eye. The same April Rutgers-Eagleton poll shows a whopping 61% with an unfavorable view of Trump, while 12% have no opinion.
At the same time – and this is why anti-establishment Democrats see real opportunities (just look at the depressed results of incumbent mayors in the May nonpartisan elections), the same poll shows residents split on Democratic incumbent U.S. Sen. Cory Booker. “Thirty-eight percent of residents have a favorable view, while 33% have an unfavorable view and 20% have no opinion. Eight percent say they don’t know who he is.” His negatives aren’t anywhere Trump’s, but his positives don’t hover anywhere near great, either.
Ultimately, in this state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by a million voters, Booker – unopposed in the primary – won’t have trouble statewide this year.
Republicans who can’t get away from Trump, however, have problems (and they have problems if they try to get away from him, too, just ask Tom Massie), especially in CD-7, a district commanding national attention, where Governor Mikie Sherrill this month killed an attempt by the Trump Administration to site an ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) facility, a project that local Republicans also opposed.
“Since we filed litigation, we’ve been demanding the federal government back off its rushed construction and operation of an immigration detention center in Roxbury,” said the Governor in a statement with state Attorney General Jennifer Davenport. “We’ve been clear from the beginning that DHS’s proposed ICE detention facility in Roxbury will harm the community and won’t do anything to make us safer. If DHS conducts a proper analysis, it will discover that this industrial warehouse is no place for a detention center. If DHS continues to plow ahead after conducting its further analysis, we will return to Court to seek relief immediately.”
Between that and the Governor having to go to court to override Trump’s attempt to crush the Gateway Tunnel project supplying very district-centric evidence of MAGA mangled policies hurting New Jersey, not to mention everything else spewing out of Trump world, the GOP will have fits trying to survive the coming drubbing, after Democrats resolve their present fights.
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