Why Trump being the worst president in history may not be enough for Democrats

Trump is snoozing, losing, and eating shit… everywhere. His net job approval is -24, the worst of his presidency, and it hasn’t cracked -10 in a single Economist/YouGov poll since June 2025.

Democrats should be cruising toward a historic landslide, as opposition parties with extremely unpopular new presidents have in nearly every midterm election for generations. But they may not be, because Democrats are almost as unpopular. A Fox News poll this month put the Democratic Party at -15 favorability, worse than the Republican Party’s -10 — the first time in over a decade Republicans have out-favored Democrats.

YouGov’s polling shop dug into why the generic congressional ballot hasn’t moved to match Trump’s collapse. They found 58% of registered voters disapprove of him. Only 44% of those disapprovers say they’ll vote Democratic.

As G. Elliott Morris highlighted in Strength In Numbers, that remaining 14-point gap isn’t made up of reachable swing voters looking for moderation—40% of that gap consists of “Republicans at heart” who will never vote for a Democrat. The remaining 60% of the gap is split between uncommitted Democratic-leaning voters (40%) and low-turnout, politically disengaged voters (20%) who dislike Trump but rarely follow news or show up at the polls.

John Ray runs polling for YouGov Blue. He posted the numbers on Bluesky this week, then added his read:

He’s right but only because he’s getting at a much bigger point.

Republicans have created a machine to help a GOP president survive nine Watergates and two Iran-Contras a day, something JD Vance bragged about recently when he said, “If Watergate happened tomorrow, it would be like a 12-hour news story. The idea that it would have taken down a presidency is crazy.”

That machine wasn’t built overnight, nor was it built just for Vance, Trump, or Musk.

It was refined through George W. Bush’s second term—when two endless, disastrous wars and the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression should have permanently rendered the GOP brand toxic. Instead, the right-wing media apparatus spent the next six years re-engineering the public narrative, converting historic governing failures into a tea party revival that swept Democrats out of Congress just two years later.

What Vance is bragging about is the machinery the right has spent 60 years building against Democrats and, thus, democracy itself. Let’s survey their works and despair for a moment because it’s grown even more powerful and unchecked since Trump turned January 6th into a campaign asset.

The GOP’s Large Hadron Collider for Fascism

• Fox News, 24 hours of hate. Not a network with a conservative lean — the GOP’s assignment desk that decides what counts as news for the entire right side of the country, every hour of every day, with nothing on the left built at that scale to compete.
• X, rigged for Elon’s pleasure and influence. Marcy Wheeler calls it, “The Machine for Fascism.” A randomized 2026 Nature study put nearly 5,000 real users on the algorithmic feed for seven weeks. They moved right, grew more sympathetic to Trump and to Russia’s position on Ukraine — and switching them back to a plain chronological feed didn’t undo it. The shift stuck.
• Meta, running the same play without Elon’s erratic tells. Mark Zuckerberg didn’t just deprioritize political content on Instagram and Threads; he neutered fact-checking and algorithmically choked news distribution, handing the advantage directly to right-wing outrage machines that thrive on engagement over accuracy. Now it’s just basically an AI hell of casual racism and boobs bouncing in your face—forever.
• CBS, now Diet Fox. One more legacy outlet that used to be a check drifting into stenography while killing the stories 60 Minutes would likely be telling about the horrific corruption of Trump’s Gilded Age.
• Fox’s imitators and AM radio. The infrastructure that reaches the voters who never opened a newsletter or a podcast app in their lives.
• The Bro-Cast Pipeline. While Democrats buy billions in ads, conservatives dominate low-information environments—the endless web of comedy, sports, and lifestyle podcasts where millions of politically disengaged voters get passive, low-key right-wing messaging without ever tuning on Hannity.
• Local TV and Sinclair Broadcasting. For voters who still tune into local news for traffic and weather, conservative syndicates deliver forced, scripted right-wing editorials directly into living rooms across battleground states—disguised as trusted hometown journalism.
• Legacy Media, hooked on false balance. Outlets like CBS, The New York Times, and CNN remain trapped in a 1990s “bothsidesism” doom-loop—treatments that normalize authoritarian rhetoric and historic corruption as routine political gamesmanship to avoid accusations of bias.
• Elon’s money, spent like he’s running a scam, not a campaign. Musk has abandoned the traditional ideas of targeting high-propensity voters. He wants to hook anyone, and he knows that the less informed a mark is, the more Trump-friendly they are likely to be. It seems comical but if you doubt Elon Musk can be successful shamelessly selling people crap based on fraud, think harder.
• The money. Flush with Trump’s tax cuts for the rich and an AI bubble inflated beyond all human ken, Republican-leaning donors have outspent Democratic-leaning donors $880 million to $290 million in just the first half of 2026, per a Washington Post analysis. Musk alone has put in roughly $90 million since June. In 2024, his PAC ran an 18-day “$1 million a day” sweepstakes for registered voters — his own lawyers later admitted in court the “winners” were preselected. That’s not the gentle old approach of two candidates shaking hands with somebody’s baby. That’s a mark getting worked.
• The Voting Rights Act, finished off this spring. The Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling in Louisiana v. Callais on April 29, 2026 left Section 2 what Justice Kagan called “all but a dead letter.” States are already redrawing maps because of it.
• A neutered FEC. No quorum since April 2025. It cannot investigate, cannot enforce, cannot do anything but watch super PACs and dark money run past whatever’s still nominally on the books.
• The lag from Biden’s real shocks. Inflation exploding, Roe dying, and Democrats failing to stop a second Trump term all happened on the last watch. That damage to trust didn’t clear when the administration changed. It’s still being spent down.
• Corporate centrists and “Never Trump” Republicans who barely exist as voters but dominate the microphone. The persuadable, Republican-aligned Trump-disapprovers — the actual data says — are 89% already going to vote Republican anyway. A rounding error at the ballot box. And yet that same small slice controls a wildly outsized share of what the “earlyworms” — the fifth of the country that follows news first and tells everyone else what it means — actually hear.

What Ray and Morris are getting at, without always calling it out explicitly, is that sixty years of GOP investment in exactly this architecture is paying off, possibly saving the most unpopular president in modern polling history from the comeuppance voters have already decided he’s earned.

None of it is a mystery. It’s an attack that’s been running since before most of the people reading this were born, hitting a target that’s spent two years disapproving of the man in charge without anywhere near enough of a counter-machine to catch what that disapproval should be worth in November.

Stop Waiting for Sense to Save Us

Democrats, with their enlightenment brains, keep waiting for the gravity of Trump’s scandals, his tanking approval numbers, or the next historic collapse to do the work for them. But gravity doesn’t work in a vacuum.

If six decades of conservative media engineering prove anything, it’s that a scandal is only as fatal as the information environment allows it to be. The GOP built a machine designed to absorb Watergates, outlast economic meltdowns, and turn structural failures into base-mobilizing outrage.

Winning that 60% pool of uncommitted and disengaged voters won’t happen by waiting for them to wake up to the news—it happens by building the infrastructure required to reach them where they actually live, as the projects funded by the Movement Voter Project do. Until Democrats invest in their own media ecosystem with the same long-term, ruthless aggression, they will stay locked in a dogfight against a machine designed to never lose.

What We’re Doing About It

Now let’s stop despairing. Trump will only get worse. And Democrats, we hope, can only get better as they show the fight voters have been hoping to see for at least a decade now.

Reaching the voters who’ll decide this election means Democrats have to build narratives the way the right does — positive and negative, continuous, occupying the room instead of waiting for it — without the malice, but with the same discipline. That’s the whole argument of The Trillionaire Kill Chain: every stage of the machine documented, the money traced, the playbook named, before the disengaged third of the country makes up its mind on someone else’s terms.

Subscribe to THE FARCE newsletter, join the LOLGOP Studios Patreon, or drop a tip. Free or paid, your support keeps us independent and fearless.

Play our new game—Data Center Invaders.