The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Wednesday shows that 52 percent of likely US voters approve of President Trump’s job performance. Trump has been at or above 50 percent for weeks now. Rasmussen is one of America’s most accurate polling organizations.
I know that my almost daily sharing of this poll comes off to some as obnoxious—taunting those who can’t believe Trump still holds strong public support. But it shows how out of touch they are with the heartland—as well as demonstrating an ignorance of the way propaganda works.
The prevailing narrative—that Trump is deeply unpopular among the American people—is false. The narrative is an elite manufacture and endlessly repeated if for anything to entrench the attitudes of those already indoctrinated. That was the purpose of “No Kings Day,” which utterly failed to change public opinion, but reinforced existing attitudes that will prove useful for the next attempt to sway public opinion through the optics of big crowd.
The way the media covers Trump reflects an elite perspective—not a popular one. When you listen to the legacy media talk about Trump, you’re not hearing the voice of the public. You’re hearing from the propaganda wing of the corporate class—an elite that has long relied on Democrats to carry out its economic and political agenda. The media substitutes elite opinion for that of the people (this is true throughout Europe, where it is much more effective). This is more than just bias—it’s a deliberate strategy rooted in a century of thought about power and persuasion.
Antonio Gramsci, the Italian Marxist imprisoned by Mussolini, called this “ideological hegemony.” He argued that in advanced capitalist societies, power is maintained not just through coercion, but through elite corruption and shaping of common sense, culture, and norms. The corporate class doesn’t simply impose its will on the people (that’s messy and unsustainable); it makes its worldview and the interests it envelops feel inevitable, natural, and universal.
It does this through the work of intellectuals—people who articulate, justify, and spread ideology on behalf of the corporate class. Today, these intellectuals control academic, cultural, and media institutions. The worldview that issues from the country’s sense-making institutions is at odds with the reality on the ground. The people have seen this and it is hard to imagine they are ever going to return to the matrix.
Crucially, Gramsci distinguished between “traditional intellectuals” and “organic intellectuals.” The traditional intellectual—the academic, the priest, the scientist—presents themselves as neutral and objective, above class conflict. They truck in knowledge. Or so they claim. They at least maintain the appearance of detachment from politics. Yet they almost always serve the existing order by defining what counts as legitimate knowledge or respectable discourse within the general frame produced by the mode of production.
Karl Marx put this well the German Ideology: “The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force.” Marx continues: “The class which has the means of material production at its disposal has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it.” Put another way, those who control the economic base also tend to dominate the ideological superstructure—through culture, education, and media. It’s a foundational idea that Gramsci later deepened with his theory of hegemony.
The organic intellectual, on the other hand, is embedded in a particular class and works to advance its interests. They are not necessarily working on the left or right, or from a particular class standpoint; there are organic intellectuals in both the capitalist class and the working class. What defines the organic intellectual is not their education or profession, but their function: they develop and spread the worldview of their class. They do not always pretend to be neutral or objective, and are openly engaged in the battle of ideas because they understand that the real political struggle is fought not only in elections and legislatures but in the hearts and minds.
As implied above, these are not mutually exclusive category. Organic intellectuals often masquerade as traditional intellectuals. That is, they present themselves as neutral and objective experts—academics, analysts, economists, physicians, scientists—whose authority supposedly derives from disinterested knowledge. But in reality, they are deeply embedded in the ideological machinery of a specific class. They deploy the language of objectivity and scientific rationality to advance political agendas, giving their class’s worldview the appearance of inevitability and truth.
This tactic is one of the most effective tools of hegemony: ideology cloaked in the robes of expertise. As a result, academic and media institutions can claim to be above politics while constantly reinforcing a very particular, very political vision of the world—one that protects existing power structures under the guise of “the facts.” Often, these functionaries genuinely believe in their own neutrality and objectivity, having themselves been thoroughly indoctrinated into the very ideology they unconsciously serve; their sincerity makes their authority even more effective and their influence more difficult to challenge.
In our current media environment, the columnists and pundits who claim to speak for “democracy” or “the rule of law” are, in Gramscian terms, the intellectuals of the professional-managerial and corporate classes. They frame Trump’s appeal and populism as a pathology—something irrational and dangerous. Their job is not to convey public opinion but to contain and distort it, to reassert ideological control over a population that is increasingly rejecting their consensus.
Noam Chomsky, decades later, called this mechanism “manufacturing consent”—a term he borrowed from Edward Bernays, the father of public relations and a proud propagandist. Bernays didn’t hide his contempt for democracy. He referred to the public as a “bewildered herd” that needed to be guided by an enlightened elite. He called this “engineering consent.” Gramsci, Chomsky, and Bernays were describing the same structure from different angles: a system where elite voices dominate the public sphere, not to reflect the will of the people but to corrupt, manage, and shape it.
So when you see a poll like Rasmussen’s—when over half of likely voters support a president the media insists is illegitimate, unelectable, or universally hated—you’re seeing a crack in the hegemony. You’re seeing that the people think for themselves. That doesn’t mean you have to agree with Trump or support him. But it does mean you should question the storyline that says his support is a fringe delusion. It isn’t. It’s a political fact that millions of Americans hold views that are completely alien to the worldview of the elite class—and that class responds not by reckoning with that reality, but by doubling down on its narrative, which is becoming more absurd with each new day. The public is becoming immune from propaganda, and a big part of this is the liberation of Twitter from corporate state control and the rise of “alternative” media (e.g., Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson) close to the People.
Sharing these poll numbers isn’t about “owning the libs” (I’m a liberal, for the record). It’s about disrupting a system that pretends to speak for the people while systematically ignoring and misleading them. It’s about resisting a media and political apparatus that treats dissent as misinformation and populism as pathology. It’s about reclaiming the right of the people to define what is legitimate, normal, and possible—not according to the elite, but according to the people themselves.
In a letter from Thomas Jefferson to William Charles Jarvis in September 1820, the former President wrote, “I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves: and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is, not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.”
Jefferson did not say ideology, indoctrination, or propaganda or whatever words were available at that time to conveys these forms of manipulation. He said education. From the tone of the letter, and context in which the letter was written, he does not mean education in public schools. He means that it’s the job of the representative to explain to his constituents why he has decided the course upon which he has set the district, state, or nation. And if the people disagree, they can take advantage of the next election to put another representative in his place.
freedom and reason 