Our So-Called Foreign Policy: What Does the Public Think of Khashoggi, Trump, and the Saudis?

Tags

Axios.com, Democrats, Harris, independents, Jamal Khashoggi, Our So-Called Foreign Policy, partisanship, Rasmussen, Republicans, sanctions, Saudi Arabia, Survey Monkey, The Hill, Trump

If you follow the news, you know that there are few if any stories bigger Saudi Arabia’s killing of dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, a legal U.S. resident, and President Trump’s unwillingness to hold the kingdom’s top leaders accountable – at least according to America’s tightly intertwined national political classes and Mainstream Media.

At the same time, if anything’s clear from recent domestic political trends – especially the rise of populism – it’s that the priorities of these national elites and the general public don’t always coincide. And the polling on this issue makes pretty clear that the Khashoggi killing and the Trump reaction is one of those instances.

The sample size isn’t big (three surveys) and all of them predate Mr. Trump’s full, November 20 explanation of his final decision on Khashoggi and his Saudi policy. But none point to reactions that would even come close to justifying the amount of time and space being devoted to the issue by the political and media kingpins.

Two of the polls came out on October 24. The first, by Rasmussen, found that by a 57 percent to 33 percent margin, “likely U.S. voters” believed that Khashoggi’s (then) “disappearance and suspected murder was “important to U.S. national security. Eleven percent were undecided. Those results don’t exactly indicate the peasants were reaching for their pitchforks. Nor does the fact that 68 percent of those likely voters favored American sanctions on Saudi Arabia if the monarchy’s involvement was “proven.” After all, “sanctions” can encompass a wide range of measures.

That same day, an Axios/Survey Monkey sounding reported that 56 percent of U.S. adults polled considered the President’s “response to Saudi Arabia for the Khashoggi murder” as “not tough enough.” Just under a third viewed it as “about right” and five percent deemed it “too tough.”

Repeating a pattern often found in recent polling, opinion was sharply divided along partisan lines. A much higher share of Democrats (78 percent) than Republicans (37 percent) chose the “not tough enough” answer. Independents fell right in the middle, with “not tough enough” prevailing in their ranks by 55 percent to 32 percent.

Somewhat different results came from a posting in The Hill newspaper from a survey it conducted along with the Harris organization. Their poll found that by a 49 percent to 29 percent margin, “registered voters” favored waiting on anti-Saudi sanctions until after an independent investigation determines if the Saudi Arabian government is responsible for the killing of Jamal Khashoggi” rather than impose such measures beforehand. And 16 percent of respondents said that the United States “should not be involved in the matter.”

Nonetheless, the partisan split story remained intact, with many more Democrats (38 percent) than Republicans (20 percent) favoring “sanctions now” and somewhat more Republicans (57 percent) than Democrats (46 percent) wanting an investigation first. Twenty eight percent of independents supported sanctions before an investigation whereas 45 percent wanted to wait.

In fact, the partisan split results lend some credence to the proposition (believed by yours truly), that views of the Khashoggi murder and the best U.S. response reveal more about Americans’ views of Mr. Trump than anything else. That is, if you generally like the President or his job performance, you’re likely to at least cut him some slack on Saudi policy, and make the point to a pollster; if you don’t, you’re not.

Some more evidence for this belief: In the Hill/Harris poll, independents were significantly more likely (22 percent) than either Republicans (16 percent) or Democrats (11 percent) to back American non-involvement in the Khashoggi affair.

All of this might change when we start getting polls based on research following the President’s big Khashoggi statement – which represented an unusually blunt,  arguably narrow, and arguably cockeyed, version of realpolitik. But overall the strongest reason for concluding that this issue doesn’t – and won’t – mean remotely as much outside elite political and media circles as inside is probably this Axios/Survey Monkey finding: Only four percent of their respondents considered foreign policy “their top issue.” As I’ve repeatedly written, that’s also a leading sign of the public’s superior common sense.

Im-Politic: Why the Elites’ Trump Bashing Keeps Flopping

Tags

2016 election, Bloomberg, Cheap Labor Lobby, China, Donald Trump, elites, free trade agreements, Im-Politic, Immigration, Jobs, media, Mitch McConnell, Muslim ban, NBC News, Obama, political class, punditocracy, Rasmussen, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Timothy Egan, Trade, Trans-Pacific Partnership, wages

Two weeks ago, I wrote that if opponents of Donald Trump really wanted to stop him in his tracks, they’d support seriously addressing the legitimate economic grievances of his supporters. The firestorm ignited by the Republican presidential front-runner’s proposal temporarily to bar non-citizen Muslims from entering the United States signals that legitimate national and personal security grievances need to be dealt with, too. After all, that would be a constructive response. Instead, most of the anti-Trump forces, especially in the nation’s elite media and political classes, have doubled down on the invective.  

New York Times columnist Timothy Egan’s latest offering was especially revealing in this regard. He both repeated the by-now standard denunciations of Trump as a neo-fascist, bigot, and xenophobe. But then he added an interesting wrinkle. Like some of his colleagues, he made a (typically condescending) nod to how “most” Trump supporters “do not see the shadow of the [Nazi] Reich when they look in the mirror. They are white, lower middle class, with little education beyond high school. The global economy has run them over. They don’t recognize their country. And they need a villain.”

Egan also just as typically charged that “Trump has no solutions for the desperate angst of his followers.” That’s patently false. Trump’s position paper on China, closely resembles the specifics-laden approach taken by many critics of America’s China trade policies in Congress – especially in Democratic ranks. And although his call for mass deportation is surely unworkable (and likely to be replaced by a completely realistic attrition strategy), Trump’s immigration position paper is similarly detailed and entirely practicable – albeit anathema to the corporate Cheap Labor Lobby and the guilt-saturated elitist mass immigration crowd on the Left.

But then Egan did something completely weird. He insisted that “Tearing up trade agreements is not going to happen.” But he himself offered no specifics as to why. After all, all treaties and similar agreements have “out” clauses. Abundant evidence shows that these deals and related policies have slowed growth (and therefore job creation) tremendously in this already miserable economic recovery. And opposition to the latest attempt to add to this destructive record – President Obama’s Trans-Pacific Partnership – keeps mounting. Even so dedicated an outsourcer toady as Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has just urged that Congress not vote on the TPP until after the election.

Which all raises the question: Is Egan ignorant enough to believe that a major course change for U.S. trade policy is still impossible? Or is he one of those boardroom liberals who’s trying to prevent one?

Meanwhile, the futility of trying to marginalize Trump at all costs becomes clearer by the day. The latest evidence comes from the current round of opinion polls. As I’ve often written, they’re often full of problems and this last batch is especially all over the map. But two of them (from Rasmussen and Bloomberg) show that Trump’s Muslim ban – which I oppose – has attracted significant and partly bipartisan backing, and the Rasmussen survey shows it enjoys a plurality.

Perhaps more revealing, NBC and The Wall Street Journal, which pegged backing for the ban at only 25 percent nationally, found in a pre-ban sounding that 54 percent of Americans believed that the United States admits too many immigrants from the Middle East – including more than a third of Democrats. And what does the public think of President Obama’s approach to terrorism and ISIS – which particularly in the former case the punditocracy seems to consider the gold standard? According to a new New York Times-CBS News survey, 57 percent disapprove.

The bottom-line here appears pretty clear. Mainstream political and media elites are increasingly convinced that Trump has “crossed lines” that must never be crossed, and data keeps appearing that, thanks largely and understandably to their clueless insistence that standard approaches are working as well as possible, the lines themselves are moving dramatically.