Poll: even Republicans think congressional leaders are pretending to like Trump

Even Republicans don’t believe that congressional Republicans like President Donald Trump and want to help him.

According to a CBS News poll, 39 percent of Republicans believe congressional Republicans don’t like the president and are actively working to undermine him. Another 37 percent believe congressional Republicans don’t like the president — but they pretend to like him in order to get his agenda passed.

This seems to indicate that Republicans are seeing through the silence many congressional Republicans have toward Trump. Republican Sen. Bob Corker started publicly critiquing the Trump administration after announcing that he will retire rather than run for reelection in 2018. But as Vox’s Andrew Prokop writes:

His GOP colleagues in the Senate, though, are not so liberated. So though Corker has also asserted that “the vast majority” of his fellow Republican senators understand “what we’re dealing with here” — that they share his concerns about Trump’s temperament — most of them remain hesitant to publicly discuss the issue in public.

The poll also asked what congressional Republicans should do, and just 20 percent of all Americans and 39 percent of Republicans said they should follow Trump’s desires. Everyone else believes congressional Republicans should push back when they disagree with him or get tougher with him.

So just to rehash: More than 75 percent of Republicans don’t think congressional Republicans like Trump. And more than 50 percent think congressional Republicans need to push back or get tougher on Trump.

Yet still it takes a retiring senator to get a frank and honest assessment of the president.

Meanwhile, 30 percent of Americans think we’re on the path to another world war. Another 48 percent think we’re “maybe” headed for a third world war. In other words, nearly three-fourths of Americans think it’s at least a possibility.