On Friday, during an interview on CNBC, the House speaker, Mike Johnson, claimed that President Trump was among the most popular people to ever occupy the Oval Office.
The president is the most maligned and attacked political figure in the history of American politics. There’s no question about it, but he’s also the most resilient. And you see at the same time, his approval ratings are skyrocketing. CNN had a story, I think, a day or two ago. He was at 90 percent approval rating. There’s never been a president that high.
You can decide for yourself if you think this president is “the most maligned and attacked political figure in the history of American politics” (Abraham Lincoln might disagree), but it is frankly ludicrous to say that Trump’s approval ratings are “skyrocketing” or that he represents a high-water mark of presidential popularity.
Recent surveys from YouGov, Quinnipiac University, The Associated Press-NORC and Reuters/Ipsos place Trump at roughly 40 percent approval. CNN, contra Johnson, puts Trump at 42 percent approval and 56 percent disapproval. Overall, according to the Strength in Numbers presidential approval average, 42.6 percent of Americans approve of the president’s performance while 53.5 percent disapprove, for a net negative of -10.9 points, a low for his second term so far.
But the substance of Johnson’s absurd claim about the president’s popularity is less interesting to me than the fact that he would even say it. The House speaker’s assertion that Trump was at a “90 percent approval rating” is the kind of falsehood you might hear from authoritarian state media. It is a servile display of allegiance as much as it is an attempt to mislead viewers. It’s Johnson telling Trump he is his man.
In the neo-republican ideology that shaped the American founding, civic virtue is a key part of self-government. A corrupt people cannot, in this vision, form a free government. “Just as good customs require laws in order to be maintained,” Machiavelli observed, “so laws require good customs in order to be observed.”
For Frederick Douglass — the great abolitionist and thinker whose political philosophy was shaped by republican thinking — virtue includes self-respect, cultivated through education, and self-reliance. “Liberty has its manners as well as slavery,” Douglass wrote to the Black abolitionist and journalist Martin Delany in 1871, “and with those manners true self-respect goes hand in hand with a just respect for the rights and feelings of others.”
My immediate thought upon seeing Johnson’s performance on air was to reflect on this relationship between self-respect and self-government. To tell such egregious lies for the approval of some higher authority is to prostrate yourself — to show, for the world to see, your lack of self-respect. This becomes all the more egregious when one considers that Mike Johnson, as speaker of the House of Representatives, is more an equal to the president, in the American constitutional order, than he is a subordinate. He should have the dignity, at least, to act as a peer and not a supplicant.
With that said, Johnson’s behavior as speaker makes sense if he lacks the self-respect befitting a free citizen of a republic. A man who takes every opportunity available to show his belly to his leader would sign his constitutional authority away to an aspiring tyrant, ceding his power like Esau did his birthright. But where Isaac’s firstborn son could at least get a bowl of stew, all that Johnson really has is the idle approval of Donald Trump, a man not known for loyalty or even appreciation. That, I’d say, is thin gruel for what one must sacrifice to receive it.
