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Comment by hooande | Hacker News Reader

Millions of Americans watched the Capitol insurrection play out live on tv. That has an impact on the national psyche that's very similar to a terrorist attack. People aren't going to forget about it because we all witnessed it together. It's going to be the defining event of trump's presidency, whether you think that's fair or not

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You honestly think that THE defining event of Trump's presidency is going to be the Capitol riot? You don't think it's the bungled response to coronavirus that landed us all locked up in our houses for over a year, the assassination of an Iranian leader on another sovereign's soil, the trade war with China, the tax reform bill he pushed through, the Mueller probe, the BLM protests, the "stolen" SCOTUS seats, or any number of other things he did?

You think the defining moment of his presidency is something that he only tangentially had a hand in that resulted in a couple arrests and a stolen podium?

That's a hot take.

Those are slow burns. The attack on the capital was a severe jolt to our national psyche. You may not want them to be different, but they are.

How many of those other things was he impeached and subsequently condemned by the Republican floor leader in the Senate for?

I didn't realize that Moscow Mitch was the bellwether of history.

Being impeached twice is the landmark here. We're living some pretty important history as it's being written right now.

Yup, down fall of an empire. Don't fight it, world would be a better place afterward.

Would it? After the fall of rome we got the middle ages

None of those threatened Senate directly. They are simply protecting themselves.

To be honest I had almost forgotten about many of these events until you mentioned them again. There are just so many things going on that it's hard to fixate too much on one thing. That said, humans tend to focus on both the beginning and end of a time-frame. In this case, the Capitol raid has a clear advantage over the other things you listed.

The virus is in its own zone as far as memory is concerned. It's been going on for so long that it overshadows Trump to some extent

> It's going to be the defining event of trump's presidency, whether you think that's fair or not

Trump's approval is not the lowest it's been during his presidency - it was lower in Dec 2017 [0], and even now at 39.2% it's almost twice that of Congress [1] at 20%.

It doesn't seem to have hurt him all that much. If you look at favorability rather than job approval, it even seems to be almost unchanged [2], only having gone from 45% to 43%. And if you give any weight to Rasmussen, they have Trump's total approval going up since the 6th, from 47% to 51% [3]!

[0] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/trump-approval-ratings/

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2019/06/01/politics/poll-of-the-week-con...

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/poll-trump-a...

[3] https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/tru...

> Trump's approval is not the lowest it's been during his presidency

In the Gallup poll it is [0], in the particular weighting and aggregation used by 538 it is not.

> it's almost twice that of Congress

Congress isn't a person, it's an aggregate, for which any voter will not have had a voice in selecting 532 of 535 voting members. Comparison of Congress’s approval ratings to the President’s are meaningless, and only ever resorted to by people trying to make horrendously unpopular Presidents look more popular than they are.

> if you give any weight to Rasmussen,

You probably shouldn't; they've always had a pro-Republican house effect as a pollster matching their editorial tilt, which isn't too worrying, but they’ve pretty overtly gone into hyperpartisan mode since the election.

[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/328637/last-trump-job-approval-...

I can't discount Rasmussen completely, because their presidential polling was among the most accurate in both 2016 and 2020.

So you just get to pick and choose which polling to use?

The first one is an aggregate, the second and third were just among the top of my Google results (and CNN has been pretty biased against Trump for his whole presidency), and I do specifically call out Rasmussen.

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