And it seems to indicate that, yeah, there are some things Americans like, but a growing list of things that they don't like.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right.

I mean, look, Trump came in, he had a positive net approval rating.

His approval rating was above his disapproval rating, and it made folks like me go, whoa, we never saw that during Trump's first term.

And then all of a sudden this week, the numbers started coming in from a month in, and what did we see?

We saw Trump underwater in our CNN poll.

We saw Trump underwater in the Quinnipiac University poll.

We saw Trump underwater in the Washington Post-Ipsos poll, and so on, so forth.

So he's clearly underwater now.

He's in a better position than he was, let's say, for most of his first term, but it's going in the wrong direction, and it's going in the wrong direction at the same time that folks are saying this economy ain't so hot to try.

It's coming at a time in which his economic approval ratings stink, far worse than during his first term.

There are a lot of warning signs for Donald Trump and the numbers that came out.

Yeah, I mean, look, you could argue that everybody's numbers go down, right?

Like no president goes up.

They always go down.

However, what's striking to me, and the question that keeps turning over in my head is, does the man even care?

He's supposedly not running again, although he keeps joking about maybe he will, but do poll numbers even matter if your name is Donald Trump right now?

Yes and no.

I think that he picks and chooses what information he chooses to believe, so as long as he can find some poll numbers that have him looking like he's doing really well.

But what he does care about is things like the stock market and the Dow Jones closing low because of risks of tariff and because of tariffs in some of his trade policies.

That actually does resonate with him.

When I worked with him, he'd always have Fox Business on in the outer oval and just want to see every day how the markets close.

So if he feels like he's looking weak on the world stage and if he's feel like the economy is not moving quickly enough, that is something he'll react to.

And I've said to my friends in Trump world, they should not take too much with this endorsement of the fact that he won and he won the popular vote, which was a surprise to some.

He was very clearly elected on two things he's good at, securing the border and allegedly addressing the economy.

All of these other things are reminding people they might like the idea of Donald Trump better than Donald Trump himself.

And to piggyback off of that, and I was here a couple of weeks ago and I bemoaned that there was so much focus on DEI and I said that Americans were concerned about the economy and we're seeing now, because I saw your report on yesterday, that's where Donald Trump is failing most.

Well, not failing, but that's where the issue is with Donald Trump regarding the economy.

People are, there's not a lot of pushback that you see around the immigration policy.

We see that about 93 border engagements or maybe about 93% ICE arrests are doubled now what they were.

Donald Trump has done some things around IVF treatment.

And I think that that's a very good thing as an extension of what Donald Trump did when he was in office where it was through the Veterans Administration, the Veterans Health Administration, they were focusing on providing IVF treatment to veterans and their families.

So those types of things are important.

But I think what you said in addition to the economy, it is how people feel in, are you being reminded about the things you don't necessarily like about Donald Trump?

Economic anxiety is the thing that the Trump campaign ran on and I think that he won on.

Well, that economic anxiety still exists.

And I know because 899 was the cause of AIDS.

Oh, I got hit with the 850 yesterday.

Not to one-up you, but I paid like 999 today.

Across the street from my house.

But the point is, where's the focus on the bird flu and the AIDS crisis?

But I am fascinated by you saying that he is joking about running again.

I'm saying, he claims it's a joke.

I don't know if it's a joke.

Was it the White House Twitter account that put out the thing that called him the king?

Right.

The convention this weekend with all these people talking about the idea of him running again.

These ain't no jokes.

Like deep down inside, this is serious.

And the reason this terrifies me is there is no joke.

You're not supposed, you can't run again if you're in his position.

So if the joke is that you're running again, there is not going to be an election if this is going to be the thing that you are going to do.

So when we start talking about his polling numbers, I'm fascinated by that because it is almost as though we are treating him like a president who could run again.

Now that could be deleterious to the party itself if he has terrible numbers and then you get to a midterm election and everybody goes down.

But for him, at least in theory, the polling doesn't matter.

That's the beauty of being a second term president.

That's the complaint about Obama's second term was what did you have to lose this time?

You could have done a whole bunch of other stuff.

So when we start talking about him in the context of polling numbers, I feel like we're looking at him in a way that legitimizes the potential for what could really happen, which is there might not be a 2028 election, at least the way that these people are behaving as though that is not in their plans.

I mean, who knows?

But the fact that we're even saying who knows is wild.

That could happen.

I'm not even going to go into it, but Harry.

No, I think there are two things going on.

Number one, if you look at the betting markets, I occasionally look at them, who's going to be the Republican nominee come 2028?

Donald Trump isn't a zero.

Is that what they're saying?

There are a few folks who are betting on it.

I think it was like trading at like 7% or something along those lines.

It's not the craziest thing we might've ever heard.

But I'll also say this, we talk about why Donald Trump was elected in that first place, right?

He was elected immigration, where folks actually like what he's doing in immigration, and he was elected to fix the economy where people really don't like what he's doing at this particular point.

What he was not necessarily elected to do was put Elon Musk in the position that he is in with Doge.

And if you ask voters, what is the number one thing you dislike about what Donald Trump has done so far in his second term?

It's that dismantling of the federal agencies, it's the firing of those folks, and it's putting Elon Musk in that position that he is right now, and it's so far blowing up in his face, at least when it comes to the public opinion polls.

Let me play from this really blow up of a town hall that Congressman Rich McCormick got in Georgia, a kind of rural part of the state.

Just listen to this.

Tyranny is rising in the White House, and a man has declared himself our king.

So I would like to know, rather, the people would like to know what you, congressmen, and your fellow congressmen are going to do to rein in the megalomaniac in the White House.

When you talk about tyranny, when you talk about presidential power, I remember having the same discussion with Republicans when Biden was elected.

I stand corrected, a more suburban district, but a pretty safe seat for him, and it was like that for the whole town hall.

It was not pretty.

I think one thing that gets lost about the federal government is that it is the number one employer in the United States, and no matter what people think about government employees not working hard enough, you don't have the job security, whatever it is, once you start having mass layoffs at the number one employer in America, that is going to not just affect the people you're talking to, the people related to, the people that you're talking to all the way around.

That is, I think that seemed like a better play in their minds than it's turning out to be in application, especially since it doesn't appear to make any sense.

So it's not polls that may be angry constituents, may be congresspeople freaking out, may be Jesse Watters freaking out.

I don't know.

Do we have time to play Jesse Watters?

Let's play it real quick.

He just found out he's probably gonna get laid off.

He's gonna get doged.

This guy's not a DEI consultant.

This guy's not a climate consultant.

You know, this guy is a veteran.

We just need to be a little bit less callous with the way, Harold, we talk about doging people.

Thousands of bureaucrats woke up today to a big, you're fired.

Doge is dishing out spankings like daddy daycare.

Even the holiday weekend couldn't slow Doge down.

There was a huge exodus over at the National Archives for snickety librarians were getting doged silly.

The Dewey Decimal System's next.

Doge is a blessing from the heavens above.

Well, somebody woke up and discovered that the federal government employs a lot of veterans.

It seems like that Jesse Watters agrees with me that Republicans should stop demonizing federal workers.

To his point, I know a guy down in Alabama.

First time getting a government job.

He had, you know, fresh out of college, had been trying to get a job for a couple of years now.

Finally got that government job, I think about six months ago.

Well, he's laid off now.

So his kid, his wife, all of that promise, it's totally gone.

And I think your point is right.

Once people start seeing, because when we think of federal government, for many anti-government people, they think DMV, meaning DC, Maryland, and Virginia.

They don't see federal government as someone working, living in a rural area of Mississippi, commuting to a job at the Department of Agriculture.

They don't see them as federal workers, which is why it's always easy to just say, shut them down, they'll get paid.

Yeah.

That's not how it works.

And we will find out a lot more stories like that in the coming weeks.