Trump begins to reap a backlash of his own making
Betting his presidency on assertions of unbridled power on the international and national stages, Donald Trump is starting to learn that most people don't like a bully, let alone a would-be dictator
It’s not that Donald Trump’s presidency has outright begun failing in the last couple weeks, though we can hope that we are seeing the start of a real breakdown. Rather, having attempted to storm through his first hundred days like a dictator unleashed, Trump has increasingly been shown to be constrained and opposed in multiple ways: by various political actors, by structural factors, and by his own incompetence and presumption of invulnerability. Moreover, public opinion polls are showing a real downturn in support for his presidency; in the last few days, polls from the Associated Press and ABC have put his overall approval at 39%, while another from the Washington Post puts his approval at 41%; in the case of the first two, it’s the first time we’ve seen Trump II below 40%. While Trump’s greatest threat arises from his indifference to democratic accountability and the rule of law, it is a heartening sign that so many Americans are signaling that they do not see him as representing their interests, putting a lie to his attempts to legitimize his lawless rule as somehow representing true democracy.
The chaotic attempt to impose staggering tariffs on countries around the world may be the lynchpin to his declining approval ratings and public trust. Not only did the extreme rates immediately ignite economists’ warnings of recession, the financial repercussions appear to have eroded global belief in the trustworthiness and stability of the U.S. financial system. The hegemony of the U.S. dollar and the rock-solid status of our treasury bonds began to be seriously called into question, as evidenced in the first place by unexpected and counter-intuitive movements in the bond market a few weeks ago. Critically, Trump delayed and walked back many tariffs in apparent response to the swift backlash from markets and from U.S. companies warning of disrupted supply chains and empty shelves.
Crucially for American politics, polls have shown a remarkable decline in public support specifically for Trump’s economic policies; a recent Reuters poll showed a mere 37% approval, which represents a 5-point decline from polling at the time of his inauguration and is below his lowest first-term numbers. This is especially noteworthy given how much Trump’s campaign appeal rested to a great extent on claims of a shattered economy that only he could fix. It’s certainly true that not every voter has paid close enough attention to understand how potentially catastrophic Trump’s tariff policy has been — but many at least understand that something has gone pretty screwy with so much talk in the air of recession, renewed inflation, and trade wars.
Perhaps not as immediately attention-grabbing, but arguably just as monumental to Trump’s shifting fortunes, his administration’s deportation of Venezuelan immigrants to an El Salvador torture prison has not quite gone according to plan. Revelations that the administration defied a judge’s order in sending the men to El Salvador, reports indicating that upwards of 90% of the men had no criminal records, and the outright mistaken deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia didn’t make the administration seem tough but lawless, and at a minimum provoked unease in most people who heard this news. Just as countries around the world pushed back against Trump’s crazy tariffs, some combination of grassroots agitation and Democratic political initiative made the deportations a front-page story for weeks.
Here, again, the polls provide eye-opening evidence that Trump has made serious missteps in an area that has (wrongly) been seen as a strength. A new Washington Post poll shows that some 53% “disapprove of Trump’s handling of immigration, with 46 percent approving, a reversal from February when half of the public voiced approval of his approach.” Beyond this, “Negative views have ticked up across partisan groups over the past two months, with 90 percent of Democrats, 56 percent of independents and 11 percent of Republicans now disapproving of the way the president has managed one of his core policy issues.” And as Greg Sargent discusses in an analysis of this and other recent polling, the numbers among independent voters are deeply adverse to Trump on various aspects of his immigration policy: 62% “oppose deporting international students who have criticized U.S. policy in the Mideast, 52% oppose sending undocumented immigrants who are suspected members of a criminal group to a prison in El Salvador without a hearing,” and a mere 21% “want wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia to remain imprisoned in El Salvador, while 39 percent say he should be returned to the United States.”
We can see common threads between the tariffs and the extremist immigration policy that have sparked such backlash. In both, Donald Trump made extreme, hubristic assertions of power — essentially declaring economic war on the rest of the world in the first, and taking direct aim at basic human and due process rights in the latter. Trump has behaved as if both his and U.S. power are limitless; that all should bend before his will as he takes actions that are both grandiose and illicit. In the matter of tariffs, the world in fact did not cave — it pushed back, as did U.S. companies terrified of ruin and GOP politicians who sensed economic doom and an attendant political price to be paid. And in the case of Abrego Garcia and (hopefully) the other wrongly-deported Venezuelans, Trump ran into the judiciary, and in a broader sense, into the continued existence of the rule of law in the United States, which in a rough analogue to the bond markets helped show the public that Trump appeared to be doing something deeply amiss.
But if mad-king-level hubris is a unifying factor in both instances of Trump’s overreach, there are major differences to note in searching out tentative lessons for defeating the president’s agenda of destruction and lawlessness. His economic demands sought to abuse the U.S.’s preeminent economic power, but ended up showing the limits of that power. It turns out that U.S. economic strength depends not just on coercion, but on cooperation and consent from our trading partners. Moreover, with the destabilization of the bond markets, Trump inadvertently demonstrated that there’s a structure to the world economy that depends on a certain rationality and prudence on the part of the United States. Trump’s wish to punish perceived enemies (i.e., other countries along with much of the U.S. population) faltered at the possibility of inducing a global meltdown; it’s an extreme outer bound to his craziness, but one worth remarking. Likewise, it’s noteworthy that the fears of corporate leaders appear to have played a role in tempering his policies, at least for the time being.
With the shift in public support against Trump’s immigration policies, it’s reasonable to assume that some interaction between judicial rulings, public indignation, and Democratic initiative has played a part — alongside, of course, the sheer wildness of Trump’s treatment of the deported Venezuelans, kidnapping of foreign students off the streets for alleged thought crimes, and other related outrages (such as the jailing of American citizens and European travelers caught up in the border security dragnet). It’s difficult to unthread the individual factors — Democratic politicians like Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen who traveled to El Salvador to bring attention to the unjust Abrego Garcia deportation were certainly reacting to grassroots anger, but their visits in turn likely increased public awareness and concomitant dissent towards Trump’s policies. Meanwhile, the fact that multiple judges have pushed back against Trump’s actions gave the Democratic politicians cover, and provided a baseline reality check for ordinary citizens that they were right to sense that something had gone seriously awry.
But the difficulty in teasing out what exact percentage each component of reality has played in shifting public sentiment should not override common sense. As Will Stancil reminds us in a piece that places the Abrego Garcia story in the context of inter-Democratic debates over the relative malleability of public opinion, attracting public attention and creating a sense of conflict make it likelier that a political story takes center stage in our fragmented media ecosystem. It seems extremely persuasive to the point of obviousness that Democratic initiative helped increase public outrage and attention around the Abrego Garcia deportation, and by extension around the larger set of immigration outrages perpetrated by the Trump administration.
And one major reason the Democratic efforts were effective was because the story they exposed is not only utterly sickening at a basic human level, but instantly raises questions about the basic nature of our society. You don’t have to be a human rights lawyer to intuitively grasp that kidnapping students off the street is redolent of criminal regimes, and that sending innocent men to live out their days in a foreign hellhole is the stuff of authoritarian nightmares. Likewise, whether consciously or not, many Americans grasped a basic point that began to be made explicitly by a large range of commentators: if there is no due process right for immigrants, so that a person can be sent to an overseas prison without verifying their actual criminality or even identity, then even American citizens cannot consider themselves safe from their own government. In fact, given the multi-level horror of the deportations, it would have sent an equally powerful — but demoralizing and destructive — signal if the Democrats had buried their heads in the sand. If this doesn’t piss them off, you would be right to wonder, then what act of evil ever would?
In fact, I don’t think it’s possible to overstate the outrage and threat of the deportation of Abrego Garcia and his fellow Venezuelans straight to a life in prison. Not only does it cast a pall of criminality on Trump’s broader mass deportation regime — again, a key part of Trump’s election appeal — but it also points to an existential threat against the United States. You cannot have a democracy where the government is able to ship anyone it chooses to a foreign dungeon. I’d argue that even the mere threat to do so moves a presidency from a lawful to a lawless one. And by enacting this threat in reality, even against immigrants demonized by the administration, Trump took a massive step forward in making it quite tangible for millions of Americans for whom it might have otherwise remained wholly abstract and theoretical.
Trump’s setbacks over the last few weeks should alert all who oppose him that this presidency is vulnerable — that Trump is hardly a strategic mastermind, but has pushed against the boundaries of his power so quickly that he has hit both hard limits (a world economy in which America’s primacy depends not on domination but consent from its trading partners) and provoked a righteous backlash (with judges, Democratic politicians, and ordinary citizens railing against the illegality of his deportation regime). On both fronts he has opened space for a relentless attack from those opposed to his policies, as they can now easily point to real-world evidence of his ignorance and malice. With both the crazed tariffs and the illegal deportations, measures supposedly aimed at foreigners in defense of the U.S. in fact turn out to be daggers aimed straight at American economic strength, power, and freedoms. Democrats and other opponents of Trump must seize on vivid examples of Trump’s incompetence, whether renewed inflation or innocent men condemned to foreign hellholes, as evidence of a broader pathology on the part of the president and the MAGA movement. There is no vision for building America, only a crude plan for taking down America’s “enemies” that seems almost designed to inflict unspeakable blowback against the U.S. populace.
The necessity of quickly exploiting Americans’ growing sense of unease with Trump is all the more urgent because we should not expect this would-be dictator to retreat or re-evaluate his goals. In fact, I would expect rebuffs to his illegality and to his aggrandizement of power to provoke him to lash out, and to redouble his efforts to break the rule of law and implement MAGA’s fascistic vision for America. Indeed, we have already seen evidence of escalation in the last few days. On Friday, the FBI arrested Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan for allegedly interfering with the arrest of an immigrant on what appears to be extremely dubious grounds. This comes in the wake of widespread Trump administration attacks on the judiciary around the country for rulings adverse to the administration, up to and including outright ignoring judicial orders. Attorney General Pam Bondi left no doubt that the arrest was part of this broader attack on the judiciary when she told an interviewer that, “No one is above the law in this country [. . .] We are going to prosecute you, and we are prosecuting you.” Trump’s team is clearly trying not just to push back against the judicial branch, but to intimidate it and influence its rulings.
Perhaps less strategically designed, but equally alarming, we have begun to see reports of administration deportations of U.S. citizen children, including a four-year-old ill with cancer who was not given legal representation and was shipped to Honduras without his medication. As I’ve written before, every decent American should see the deportation of American kids as the unforgivable crossing of a red line. While every immigrant deserves due process, and we should fight tooth and nail for their rights, young American citizens whose parents are immigrants have a near-inviolable claim to be in the U.S., absent extraordinary circumstances. Such moves by the Trump administration are part of an attempt to eliminate constitutionally-protected birthright citizenship — in this case, the physical removal of children from the land that gives their citizenship substance. It is nothing less than an immoral attempt to deprive American children of their broader, nationwide American community.
What we have seen in terms of structural obstacles, political opposition, and catastrophic self-owns causing serious damage to the Trump administration in recent days should end any lingering debate as to how aggressive the Democratic Party should be in opposing Donald Trump. Polls are showing what should have been intuitively obvious to any politicians worth their salt: Americans do care about human rights, even those of immigrants, and they do understand when Donald Trump proposes insane economic plans that threaten to subvert decades of American economic pre-eminence. Critically, they show that despite a torrent of lies and propaganda from the White House and the right-wing disinformation machine, Americans are still able to discern when they’re being sold a bill of goods.
Through his own hubris and embrace of a vision of America that combines economic predation, white supremacism, and a wish to anoint himself as a de facto king, Donald Trump has made enemies of countries around the world while provoking millions of Americans into a growing backlash. The very things Trump believes make him powerful— his willingness to attack the rule of law and target officials such as judges as if we were a tinpot dictatorship like Hungary or Russia; his desire to enact barbaric punishment on those who deserve mercy and empathy; his frankly moronic ideas about how the world economy works — are actually, when viewed from another perspective, weapons he has handed the political opposition with which they can work to defeat and destroy his power. Donald Trump has increasingly demonstrated that he and MAGA are the real aliens in our midst. The sooner that Democrats can internalize and act on this fundamental reality, the sooner they will be able to do their public duty of defending America against a would-be dictator.