Leaning hard into lawless rule, Donald Trump leaves legitimacy behind
As his sinking poll numbers undermine the idea that he represents some mythical popular will, opponents have fresh opportunities to discredit his open authoritarianism
This piece was previously published at The Hot Screen.
President Trump has been too often treated in media coverage as a rambunctious president rather than as an aspiring strongman. In doing so, reporters and commentators have refused to connect the many dots that point to Trump and MAGA’s authoritarian objectives, choosing instead to discuss his power grabs and episodes of lawlessness in isolation from each other. There has been a tendency to cover his autocratic actions as strong or norm-pushing, rather than as what they really are: systematic efforts to destroy the checks and balances of U.S. democracy, to gather dictatorial powers, and to deprive the American people of their sovereignty and the political opposition of future electoral prospects. The result has been to deny the U.S. citizenry perspective on their country’s deep peril.
One major justification for such blinkered coverage is the notion that the president, no matter how anti-democratic or unconstitutional his actions, is simply acting in accordance with a supposedly decisive popular will revealed via the 2024 election. By this MAGA-propagated logic that was tacitly endorsed by many in the press, Trump’s victory accorded him special privileges to re-make American government in his own image. And in a perverse twist, Trump’s very real authoritarianism as president then created an incentive for reporters to justify, excuse, or ignore it by finding ways to reinforce the idea of his democratic legitimacy. After all, if Trump won a huge mandate and is simply reflecting the will of the people in his actions, then it’s easier to avoid grappling with the obvious contradictions between his lawlessness and his constitutionally-mandated responsibility to uphold the law, or between his claims to be acting on behalf of the people and the way that his policies tend to hurt, not help, the majority. And so we have had a lot of lazy stenography not only around what a huge victory he won last year (echoing Trump’s own false claims), but various accounts of a long-term electoral realignment, particularly based on Trump exceeding expectations with young and minority voters.
While his gains were real in the election itself, his victory was quite narrow, and the idea that it signified a longer-term shift was always speculative — yet this speculation was pursued by many in the media without obvious caveats, at least in part to avoid the blatant contradictions inherent in Trump’s supposed realignment of American politics. Were African-American men really set to continue backing an openly white supremacist president? Were young women really going to maintain their support for the man more responsible than anyone else in America for severely curtailing reproductive freedom? Were Latinos really going to keep showing support for a demagogue whose anti-immigrant message was inseparable from a MAGA belief that non-whites can’t be true American citizens?
Six months and change into his second term, Trump’s plunging poll numbers on a broad variety of issues have plunged a dagger into the bogus balloon not only of his supposed mandate, but also of using his relative popularity to ignore the clear authoritarian picture that has come into view. On a recent episode of The Daily Blast podcast, host Greg Sargent and New Republic writer Alex Shephard dug into the latest public opinion polls, and the numbers they discussed are startling. Trump’s support among voters under 30 is now 28%, whereas more than half of that demographic approved of him around the time of his inauguration; only 29% of independent voters approve of the job he’s doing; and though 48% of Latino voters cast ballots for him, now two-thirds of that voting bloc disapprove of his performance. As Shephard put it, “one of the things that really jumped out to me in recent polling is this idea that the emerging MAGA majority that Trump had really pushed after winning reelection [is] completely gone now.”
Trump’s current lack of mass support, combined with the discrediting of the theory of a foregone MAGA electoral realignment, shows that a basic conceit of news coverage — that his authoritarianism need not be described for what it is because Trump has been acting on behalf a permanent new majority — has been blown to smithereens (in addition to having been a fundamental betrayal of the public interest from the get-go). What was true on Inauguration Day is still truer today: no matter how many people voted for Trump, a primary responsibility of a free press is to highlight the actions of politicians who act to subvert and overturn a democratic America. And so Trump’s declining poll numbers are a real crisis for a news media that has spent the last six months largely treating him as a normal president, rather than as an existential threat to our government and free society; their bedrock excuse for excusing him has been shattered.
But Trump’s crashing poll numbers are even more of a crisis for the president himself. After all, Trump and the GOP have relied on perceptions of public support as cover for a radical, anti-democratic agenda that combines reactionary social and economic policy with presidential power grabs meant to free MAGA from democratic accountability. On key issues, the revelation that Trump is acting without the support of most Americans casts his policies in a harsher light than ever. As Shephard and Sargent touch on, and as I delved into a few weeks ago, support for Trump on a broad range of issues that fit under the general umbrella of immigration has declined precipitously — all the more striking as this has long been an area of key strength for the president. It seems nearly certain that the actual implementation of his extremist policies — such as brutally rounding up law-abiding undocumented workers and sending innocent men to an El Salvadorian torture prison — has been central to declining public support.
Given that Trump seems committed to massively escalating his most divisive policies — the deportations, the imprisonments, the sadistic arrests — it seems quite possible that public opposition will only continue to build. Among other things, it will become increasingly apparent that Trump’s authoritarian tendencies around immigration aren’t just in opposition to what most of the public wants, but constitute a conscious rejection of popular opinion. The haphazard inclusion of Americans in ICE arrests, the clear betrayal of a general understanding that ICE would prioritize criminals for removal, and the eager use of the U.S. military in immigration enforcement convey an immigration obsession that threatens to harm, not protect, Americans.
A similar dynamic of declining public support tied to increasing awareness of Trump’s unpopular policies seems to be playing out in the economic arena, where the president has long had a solid (if unmerited) reputation for business savvy. As others have pointed out, Trump has managed to amplify Americans’ concerns about inflation and the economy via his deeply erratic tariff regime, which to all but the MAGA faithful has the silver lining of being as crazy as it looks to the casual observer: an ironic twist for the president, as his victory last November was almost surely sealed by widespread public concern over inflation and perceptions of economic malaise during the Biden years. And as with immigration, Trump appears set on continuing his counter-productive policies. This continuity may truly backfire in the coming months, as the economy begins to suffer the inflationary effects of his tariff regime and the uncertainty he has introduced begins to drag on economic growth.
Add in Trump’s likely authoritarian response to economic problems, though, and the problems he has already created for himself start to look worse, both for him and the country. In fact, this last week we got a preview of how such tendencies can amplify his already-bad economic policies. On the heels of a downbeat job report — 73,000 positions created in July, with massive downward revisions for the two prior months — the president did what any unreasonable man would do, and proceeded to shoot the messenger. Not literally (at least this time), but by firing the chief of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, on whose head the president dumped all manner of insult, the gist being that she’s an incompetent Biden administration holdover working to sabotage news of Trump’s glorious economic accomplishments.
Unfortunately for the president, you don’t have to be a scholar of authoritarianism to easily recognize that it’s never good when a ruler fires someone for the pretty obvious reason that the person made him look bad by telling the truth (but of course, it it also totally, unabashedly authoritarian). While some Americans may be taken in by Trump’s slander of the fired BLS chief, the president and his team have done themselves no favors by suggesting the president needs his own people in the thoroughly non-partisan role of tallying up the ebbs and flows of the labor market. In one go, Trump not only drew attention to startling data showing that his policies are harming the economy, but signaled that corruption and subterfuge are to be his prescriptions both for “helping” the economy and defending his record.
This particular story may seem minor in itself, if also emblematic of how Trumpist authoritarianism combines menace and incompetence in a single package, but it points to a basic point true not just for economic policy, or immigration, but across a broad range of other areas: Trump’s authoritarian inclinations will generally lead him to do things that are both generally unpopular and also generally unlikely to succeed, where success is measured in traditional metrics like helping most Americans in some measurable way.
Another way of looking at this is that Trump is more and more openly doing things and promoting policies that are managing to piss off almost everyone: a point Shephard makes, as he shows a broad range of voters — including Trump’s MAGA core pissed off about his handling of the Epstein files — turning against the president to some degree. To put this in terms of where I began this piece: if Trump started his presidency with an illusion of extreme popularity that provided cover for his anti-democratic authoritarianism, he is now entering a far different phase, in which what was effectively a con job on much of the public and the press is falling away, revealing the popularity-corroding authoritarian underpinnings that were there all along.
As Sargent brought up in the Daily Blast episode with Shephard, the idea that Trump is a strong president simply does not stand up to the light of day. Or, to put a slightly different spin on that observation, Trump only seems like a strong president if you disregard objective measures of his presidency and buy into the idea that his anti-democratic animus makes him strong, and has moreover placed him beyond the reach of accountability by the American people. But this is a measure of strength that wrongly accords legitimacy to illegal and democratically unacceptable exercises of power — that accepts Trump’s claims of strengths on his own corrupt terms.
So how can opponents of Trump leverage his declining popularity into real political damage for the president? A key line of attack is more relevant than ever: calling out Trump as a fundamentally weak president, with no popular mandate and hamstrung by his lame duck second-term status. Ironically, it appears many Democrats have shied away from making such attacks, both out of legitimate fears that they might undercut his real authoritarian menace, and far less legitimate fears that attacking him might cause him to lash out in return. But comments by Oregon Senator Ron Wyden about his firing of the BLS chief feel right for a moment in which Trump’s popularity is teetering and his authoritarian moves are clearly rooted in his incompetence. Wyden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance committee, described the firing of the BLS head as “the act of somebody who is soft, weak and afraid to own up to the reality of the damage his chaos is inflicting on our economy”:
Bottom line, Trump wants to cook the books. Trump can’t get through a single day without making some catastrophic decision that undermines confidence in the U.S. economy, and although the Bureau of Labor Statistics might sound obscure to people outside Washington, Trump’s interference with jobs data is a nightmare scenario that will do long-lasting harm.
What’s particularly striking about Wyden’s comment is that it ties accusations of weakness to Trump’s instinct to cheat and evade responsibility in an area where Americans already have doubts about Trump, and where Trump himself just acted in a way where supposed toughness is an all-too-obvious effort to obscure his own mistakes. The idea that Trump is “afraid to own up to the reality of the damage” he’s doing turns Trump’s frenzy of action on the economy into a weakness — in essence using Trump’s strongman bluff against him.
But such attacks can’t be disconnected one-offs — Democrats need to consistently mock, confront, and escalate criticism of Trump in order to form a beneficial synergy with public opinion that is already predictably moving against the president. After all, what seems more likely: that Trump will respond to such public doubts with a true course correction, or will double down on authoritarian evasions rather than real solutions to America’s challenges? Knowing that he will only escalate and dissemble allows Democrats to stay a step ahead of Trump. Specifically, they need to call out as foolish and illicit those actions designed to make Trump appear strong — and that can in fact be dangerous threats to American safety, prosperity, and freedom — and tie them directly to the basic fact that Trump is acting out of a fundamental weakness.
This fundamental weakness is rooted in a few basic reasons: his signature policies (anti-immigrant, anti-growth, anti-science) are proving deeply unpopular as Americans witness what they mean in the real world, and will likely grow only more unpopular as their disastrous effects further ramify through the economy and American society; Trump is a lame duck president whose window for substantial legislative action for the remainder of his term is rapidly closing, and whose advanced age and deteriorating mental state are plain facts; and Trump and MAGA are engaging in open insurrection agains American democracy itself, from the de facto suspension of the rule of law and attempts to criminalize their Democratic opposition, to the illegal destruction of government agencies and capacities, to open attempts to subvert the 2026 election via gerrymandering.
When Senator Wyden spoke out against the firing of the BLS head, he provided an example of how Democrats can use the daily depredations of the Trump regime to illustrate its broader, structural failings. But the well-telegraphed efforts by Trump and his GOP allies to do whatever they can to throw the 2026 midterms to the Republicans promises to be a central political struggle over the next year; the opening shot has been to push states controlled by GOP governors and legislatures to gerrymander Democratic-leaning or toss-up House seats out of existence, to help preserve the Republicans’ very narrow majority. The party envisions locking in five seats in Texas alone.
It’s a story we will surely return to in the coming months, but we can already see how it pulls together the threads of weakness and supposed strength that opponents of Trump can weave into their own, truer story of MAGA incompetence and authoritarianism. Trump and his allies have made no secret of the fact that they understand that their unpopular policies — particularly Trump’s disastrous tariffs and the pro-rich, anti-ordinary American OBBB that Trump signed into law last month — have virtually guaranteed the Republicans a midterms shellacking. In the most obvious way possible, Trump and the GOP have determined that democracy is the disease that ails them, and that subverting the vote is the cure. The upside for Democrats is that they have plenty of clear warning to put together a public case for how a weak president can be extremely dangerous when he tries to overcome that weakness with attacks on Americans’ basic ability to throw the bums out, as has always been Americans’ god-given right — at least until MAGA came along and told us that we just have to suck it for all time, thank you very much.