Sorry, Mr. President, but you have the wrong number

Uh Oh. If I was the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, I might want to get out of town real soon or preferably out of the country. Maybe even hitch a ride on one of Elon Musk’s rockets and cool it in outer space for a while. They are about to feel the Wrath of Trump, which makes the Wrath of Khan look like a sandbox pout.

The university released a poll last week showing Donald Trump’s approval ratings are near record lows. The survey says public support for the president has dropped six percentage points since its April poll, giving Trump a meager 38% approval rating. I think I have a higher approval ratings with athletic supporters of You-Know-Where Institute of Technology.

A corresponding 58% of poll respondents say they disapprove of his job performance. I’m thinking Trump’s disapproval rating of the job performance of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst survey is currently 100% and climbing.

In fairness to the authors of the poll, they were likely too busy crunching the numbers to hear about their colleagues 90 miles away at Harvard, where the Trump administration has frozen $2.6 billion in grants and contracts to the university, claiming the place is crawling with antisemites and other assorted sins.

Harvard is not alone. Since taking office in January, the Trump administration has threatened to withhold federal money to a number of universities, including Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Northwestern, Penn, Princeton and UCLA. All are accused of running afoul of White House expectations of academia. None of which included putting out polling numbers that say less than 40 percent of Americans think you are doing a good job of running the country.

Not surprisingly, Donald Trump has his own polling data, which he says are “through the roof,” not down the dumper. He told CNBC’s Joe Kernen, “I have the best poll numbers I’ve ever had.” When Kernen corrected the president on-air, saying the high approval ratings he cited were among Republicans only, not all Americans, Trump said NBC is the “worst of them all” and that CNN’s chief data analyst Harry Enten was more credible. Oops.

Enten told his CNN colleagues the president’s net approval rating was negative nine points, down from positive six points before the election and, “If we are comparing him to other presidents at this point in their presidencies, he is the second lowest on record. When you’re comparing yourself to Richard Nixon and you say you’re doing better than Richard Nixon in your second term, that’s not exactly a good position to be in.” I smell a lawsuit coming.

One thing Donald Trump isn’t going to be able to slough off is the Jeffrey Epstein case. Even some of his sycophants in Congress are calling for release of files about Epstein’s life, after the president and top officials had for months suggested that they would expose “hidden truths” about his death but now seem averse to doing so. Deny, bluster, insult, sue, fire people. This one isn’t going away. Legislators are no doubt hearing from constituents who aren’t drinking the Kool-Aid.

The longer you stonewall, the worse it looks. The reversal has triggered backlash among Trump’s most ardent supporters. Marjorie Taylor Greene is demanding “transparency” from Trump’s administration and has warned that the issue could stoke “significant blowback” from the right wing of the party. Podcaster Joe Rogen, one of Trump’s strongest supporters, says the Trump administration’s refusal to release more information about Jeffrey Epstein is a “line in the sand.”

Even Tucker Carlson, a longtime Trump ally and former Fox host, says, “You do get in a vacuum when you’re at the top of whatever pyramid, and I don’t think they fully understand how this is being read on the outside.” The fact is that it isn’t being well-read on the outside at all.

This is one time when the RITNOs (Republicans in Trump’s Name Only) can’t control the message. Jeffrey Epstein is one of the most vile people to ever walk the Earth, and the abuse he inflicted on hundreds — some say thousands — of women and girls, some as young as 14, is beyond the comprehension of the vast majority of the rest of us. Release the records and see who — Democrat, Republican, business mogul, royalty, entertainer — was involved. They deserve the bad publicity.

In the meantime, let’s hope the intrepid Minutemen at University of Massachusetts at Amherst survive the Wrath of Trump for having dialed up the wrong number.

You can reach Dick Yarbrough at dick@dickyarbrough.com or at P.O. Box 725373, Atlanta, Georgia 31139.