Mark Halperin

And the reason I was a lot right was because just like in 2016, I talked to a lot of voters in 2024.

about how they saw this election, how they saw the prospect of Donald Trump winning again.

And I talked to people who were gonna vote for Donald Trump, who saw this as a huge corrective, not just of the Biden policies on immigration and the economy.

but of the failure to have a fair election in their view in some cases in 2020, but also because Donald Trump had been, in their view, shackled as president by various things, including the people he hired.

And they wanted Trump unshackled, and they have gotten Donald Trump unshackled.

In one short year, we've seen an extraordinary amount of change.

foreign and domestic, but particularly on the domestic front, what he's done with Congress, what he's done with business, what he's done with universities, the media, the use of his office, tearing down the East Wing, changing the name of the Kennedy Center, all these things that he didn't do like this in the first term have reinforced in the minds of so many people I talk to just how upsetting this is and how

inexplicable they find uh the fact that he's supported okay and why am i talking about this today you know i've been on my mind now for over a decade uh state of the union uh so many democrats choosing not to go so many democrats bringing guests to the state of the union uh purposely to uh troll the president annoy the president uh so much on social media with gavin newsom and other democrats using

profanity, striking back at Donald Trump with the same level of vitriol and profanity that he uses so frequently in his pronouncements on social media and elsewhere.

This is a house seriously divided.

It's a house seriously divided.

And it's divided in asymmetrical ways.

So many Democrats bristle when I talk about Trump derangement syndrome.

And I get why they do.

And not everyone who opposes Donald Trump has derangement.

They have their reasons, valid reasons in so many cases for vociferously opposing him on policy, on style, on what they believe is the most corrupt administration of all time.

But undergirding all of that is something that is rational from their point of view to be emotionally upset about this.

And the disconnect that it causes, even for

All but a handful of Democrats, whether they have so-called Trump derangement syndrome or not, they can't understand why he's supported.

Now, his approval rating is down, but he's still supported by more than 45 percent of the country.