From “Low Gas Prices Don’t Seem to be Moving the Needle for Trump—and He’s No Exception Historically” by Kyle Kondik at Sabato’s Crystal ball: “We calculated the correlation between real gas prices and presidential approval from 1977-2025. We found that there was a -.47 correlation between those two variables, so there is some negative correlation between higher gas prices and lower presidential approval…These are the same figures we found when we last looked at this in 2022. From the 1977-2011 timeframe, the correlation was -.52 and the r-squared was .27, meaning that the connection weakened a little when adding the last 15 or so years to the dataset…Part of what may be going on is that approval ratings just don’t move around very much these days. Presidents are often stuck in a narrow band that even big events don’t move much, so it stands to reason that even something important to most people’s daily lives, the price of gasoline, wouldn’t necessarily have much bearing on a president’s approval rating either…Trump’s own approval, in the low-to-mid 40s, has been fairly stable. These numbers are better now than they were at this time eight years ago (when his approval was just shy of 40% in polling averages). However, Trump also was generally around or over 45% for much of last year before dipping below that number a couple of months ago. Given the relatively stable price of gasoline over his first year in office—and the longer-term research laid out above that does not show much of a recent connection between gas prices and presidential approval—it does not seem like gas prices are having much of an effect on Trump’s approval.” Read more here.

Some insights from the Boston Review’s “Guns in the Family: A childhood steeped in guns shows that toxic masculinity and racism are at the heart of U.S. gun culture” by Walter Johnson, author of The Broken Heart of America: St. Louis and the Violent History of the United States and Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard: “The heady and uniquely American blend of martial culture, white paranoia, and toxic masculinity—which makes stories of so many U.S. families and childhoods illegible without guns—possesses an insistent teleology, a sense that all this perceived threat is leading us to someplace inevitable, a battlefield on which one will not stand a chance of surviving without a gun…When I hear the NRA people going on about how guns are just “tools,” I think, absolutely, you are right, guns are tools: tools for making emotionally stunted men feel whole; tools for guiding lonely boys along the bloody pathway to becoming violent men; tools for spreading the fearful fantasy of the coming race war; tools for enflaming urban areas in rural states, and making the argument for more cops and more prisons; tools for reproducing male dominance and white supremacy; tools for white male parthenogenesis…Until we deal with the admixture of toxic masculinity and white supremacy that produces such pornographic inequality; until we stop using armed police to guard the border between the haves and have-nots; until we recognize that imperial violence and police violence and school violence are related aspects of the same problem, we are going to keep producing killers.”

In her article, “Trump regrets not seizing voting machines after 2020 election loss” Anna Betts reports at The Guardian that “Donald Trump has said he regrets not getting the US national guard to seize voting machines after his 2020 election defeat ended his first presidency, as he continues to falsely claim that he won the race. But he has also questioned whether national guard troops would be “sophisticated enough” to pull something like that off…Trump made those remarks in an interview with the New York Times published on Sunday. The outlet had questioned him about a plan reportedly floated in late 2020, after he lost that year’s presidential election to Joe Biden, to seize voting machines in several key swing states in an effort to search for evidence of fraud…The Times reported that the idea was discussed during a December 2020 meeting in the Oval Office, where several of Trump’s advisers, including lawyer Sidney Powell and former national security adviser Michael Flynn, reportedly urged him to use the military or federal authorities to seize Dominion voting machines in states where Trump baselessly claimed that voter fraud had occurred, with the aim of conducting a recount…According to reports published in 2022, the advisers even presented Trump with draft executive orders outlining how such a seizure could be carried out. One draft order, reported by Politico, reportedly referenced conspiracy theories about election fraud in Georgia and Michigan and would have ordered the defense secretary to “seize, collect, retain and analyze all machines, equipment, electronically stored information, and material records required for retention under” a US election records law.” Betts adds, “Election integrity experts have said that the 2020 presidential race was the most secure to date. And dozens of legal challenges brought by Trump’s camp that sought to challenge the 2020 election failed.”

At Dissent, Carla Murphy writes in “Why We Need a Working-Class Media: What could the political effects be of a media that actually served working-class Americans?”: “In No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class, Christopher R. Martin shows how, since the late 1960s, journalism has practiced a “class-based redlining of the news audience” that effectively disappears working-class people and our communities. One result is that most readers today “would not learn much about the working class from the news media.”…when black writers talk about class issues, like student loan debt or the cost of higher education and housing, they’re typically presented in relation to black people only. This carve-out is facilitated by “racial disparity” data that support a single story: broad black–white comparisons rather than intra-class racial comparisons or intra-racial class comparisons. It’s not that the racial disparities formula isn’t relevant; it’s a truism that whatever goes wrong for white folks goes worse first, faster, and furthest for their black counterparts…And neither does it invite the class narratives of 40 million black and brown immigrants and their children. We hail from countries where class identity matters as much as race, ethnic, or religious identity…Just as black folks disengage from media that only makes room for black pain, the same can be said for the working class—particularly young people—watching one-dimensional representations of their lives…Demographic change and wealth inequality mean new stories about what it means to be working class are here. Let’s write them—on our terms.” More here.