August 27, 2018

Donald Trump Makes Things He Hates More Popular

The Chicago Council on Global Affairs has been busily polling the American public, and their latest survey is about international trade. It’s become surprisingly popular ever since the trade-warrior-in-chief started his anti-trade jihad from the White House:

How about that? Trump’s bellowing seems to have had the opposite effect from what he wanted. Suddenly everyone is a fan of trade. Even Republicans. But before we draw any conclusions from this, here’s another chart:

This is not quite so dramatic, but nonetheless it shows that support for higher immigration levels has gone up from 20 percent to 28 percent since 2016. Throughout the entire post-9/11 period, the number of people who want to decrease immigration has plummeted from 58 percent to 29 percent.

So what’s going on? Do things get more popular the more that Trump bashes them? That’s my working hypothesis so far, but more empirical evidence is needed. I’ll get on that later today.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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