The establishment press is singing from the same hymnal again: Trump is diminished, the world has stopped caring, and his base should stay home in November. Two outlets this week — Anchorage Daily News and Staten Island Advance — published pieces that stack poll numbers and foreign-policy hand-wringing into a single conclusion designed to demoralize America-first voters before the midterms.
The coordination matters because the press isn't reporting on Trump's standing — it's trying to manufacture it. When two outlets with nothing in common geographically arrive at the same frame within days, readers should ask who's conducting the orchestra.
The Staten Island Advance led with Civiqs polling data showing Trump at 36% approval and 59% disapproval nationwide, net minus-24 points. The poll, which the Advance cites via Newsweek, claims Trump is underwater in 11 states he carried by double digits in 2024. The turnaround supposedly began after his April 2025 tariff rollout and February's Iran escalation. The implication is clear: his signature policies are sinking him. The Advance called the numbers "devastating" — a word choice that belongs on an editorial page, not in a news lede.
The Anchorage Daily News, meanwhile, ran a piece framed around the thesis that world leaders have "stopped flinching" at Trump's threats. The article cites unnamed officials and analysts, then leans hard on two sourced voices: Italian MEP Brando Benifei, who chairs the European Parliament's U.S. delegation, and Jeremy Shapiro of the European Council on Foreign Relations — a think tank funded by European governments and corporate donors with a vested interest in keeping American trade and security commitments flowing on their terms. Shapiro told the Daily News that the "TACO" refrain — "Trump Always Chickens Out" — has spread through world capitals, and that officials "are starting to notice that he's kind of a bully, and is quite easy to scare."
What the Daily News buried: Trump's tariff threats extracted concessions from more than 75 governments in early 2025. The piece acknowledges this in a single clause before pivoting to the narrative that the leverage has since evaporated. France's central bank governor and Britain's trade officials shrugged off the latest round — but the Daily News framed their indifference as evidence of Trump's weakness rather than as a sign that the tariffs were calibrated narrowly enough to avoid market disruption, which is what the same article reports markets actually did.
What neither outlet reported: the Civiqs poll is an online rolling survey of registered voters, not likely voters — a distinction that matters enormously in midterm forecasting. The Advance noted the methodology in passing but never explained why that matters. Registered-voter screens consistently understate Republican support compared with likely-voter models.
The Daily News piece also concedes that Trump still "continues to dominate the national conversation and drive the policy agenda" at home — then treats that as a footnote rather than the lede. A president who sets the terms of debate while facing a hostile press, an activist judiciary, and a Senate from his own party that blocks his nominees is not a weakened figure — he's a contested one. The story is the contest, not the spin.
Both outlets quoted establishment figures to declare the president diminished. Both omitted the structural reasons his policies face friction — judicial overreach, Senate inertia, a lobbying class that profits from the status quo. And both published their pieces as midterm season opens, when demoralizing the incumbent's base is the only playbook the institutional press has left.
The question isn't whether Trump's approval has slipped — it has. The question is whether the press is reporting that slide or trying to accelerate it.
