Not taking long….
Trump’s falling approval ratings reveal an out-of-touch presidency, and have given space for allies to turn against him.
prospect.org
His failure has followed the usual direction of political overreach. Brave dissidents from the political opposition, corporate America, or his own coalition didn’t suddenly rise to the challenge. It started from the bottom up, as the governed gradually but definitively withdrew their consent, giving space for those we somehow call “leaders” to distance themselves.
This doesn’t mean that the subsequent three years and eleven months will be a garden of earthly delights. Terrible things are going to happen. Good people will be persecuted and bad people elevated pretty much every day for the next 1,400 or so. But when Trump disgracefully walks out of Washington in 2029, I’m far more inclined to believe that we will have a government to return to.
THE THING ABOUT POPULISM IS you have to be popular. The moment you lose touch with the public mood, you lose the ability to set your agenda without friction. I
wrote on Valentine’s Day about the big warning sign in consumer sentiment, the unanchored inflation expectations that keep
resetting higher. Trump has set himself up as the only person in the government who matters, so every national problem falls on his head. Since he’s done nothing to address those inflation concerns, voters are already starting to assign blame.
Four polls showed measurable drops in his approval rating in the last week, putting him in the lowest position for a president one month after an inauguration since …
Donald Trump, in 2017. A Reuters poll found the percentage of the public thinking the country’s on the wrong track
rose ten points in a month, and only 32 percent approved of Trump on inflation. His economic approval ratings are
lower than at any point in his first term.
When every headline out of Washington is about Elon Musk (who is also increasingly unpopular) firing workers and dismantling agencies and going after DEI programs and taking over IT systems for obscure reasons, it’s no wonder people see the president as
focused on the wrong issues. Americans believe
Trump has overstepped his authority, but if they were seeing lower prices as a result they probably wouldn’t care, sadly. The disconnect matters more than the lawlessness.