America, shame on you!

442 days into Donald Trump's term, the president's YouGov net approval rating is at a record -23: 35% approve, 56% disapprove.

At this point, the question is no longer what DJ Trump has done. The question is why nearly forty percent of Americans still stand with him.

During his second term he has compiled a record of self-serving venality that would shame a Renaissance prince. He has accepted what credible reporting describes as a $2 billion UAE crypto infusion into his personal World Liberty Financial vehicle, then quietly eased export controls on advanced AI chips for the patron state. He has demanded $230 million in taxpayer "reimbursement" from the Department of Justice for the very investigations that exposed his prior misconduct. He has rescinded ethics pledges, fired 17 inspectors general, accepted a $400M jet from Qatar's emir, and turned the DOJ into an instrument of personal retribution.

He has advanced regressive megabills slashing health coverage for the poor, invoked the Alien Enemies Act for mass deportations that include documented abuses and civic casualties, and imposed SCOTUS-voided tariffs costing each household $1,500. He seized Venezuela for oil without a war vote, attempted to end birthright citizenship by decree, and DOGE killed 317,000 federal jobs. All while issuing a nonstop torrent of documented falsehoods.

And then there is Iran. As the U.S.-Iran war escalates sharply, Trump issued repeated, explicit threats to "obliterate" Iran's infrastructure—"back to the Stone Ages." These are not off-the-cuff remarks; they are public ultimatums that legal experts have characterized as direct threats to commit war crimes against civilian infrastructure.

A narcissistic figure, already adjudicated liable for sexual abuse, referenced over 38,000 times in the Epstein files, now brandishes the world's most powerful military like a toddler with a flamethrower—driven by ego, not strategy.

Yet forty percent of Americans still approve.

The intellectual failure is staggering. These citizens have not merely been misled; they have chosen to remain misled. They exhibit the classic markers of authoritarian submission: a preference for dominance hierarchies over evidence, grievance over governance, and performative toughness over competence. Tribal loyalty becomes the only metric of truth. Moral intuition is inverted: cruelty is reframed as strength, corruption as "owning the libs," and the erosion of democratic guardrails as "fighting the deep state."

What remains is a small-brain politics of ressentiment—petty, vengeful, and catastrophically self-defeating.

And the silent majority who watch this spectacle with folded hands and furrowed brows but do nothing?

History does not record the passive as innocent. When forty percent empower a man who treats the Constitution as an inconvenience, the remaining sixty percent become accessories after the fact. Moral cowardice is still cowardice.