News to the shell shocked and the nerve desensitized: there are hopeful signs in this nation coming to us through the polls. Yes, we know, the bastard is in there for two more years, who cares what the polls say? We get that. But you have to remember the cardinal rule of political physics — Politics is a pendulum that swings back and forth. The party in power is only there for so long and then it is the party out of power. And yes, now we have a guy with King delusions in office but remember, he is delusional about a great many things, including his ill advised war and his tanking economy. Let Rick Wilson tell it.
There’s a technical distinction in survey research between soft disapproval and contempt, and Trump has crossed it. In Nate Silver’s average at the end of July, Trump sat at 38.2 percent approval and 58.8 percent disapproval, a net of minus 20.6, the worst of his second term. Worse, in fact, than any moment of his first term, including the days after January 6th, when he bottomed out at minus 19. Donald Trump is now less popular than he was while the gallows were still standing on the Mall and his terrorists were hunting Mike Pence.
And here’s the number soon to be engraved on the career tombstone of every Republican consultant still telling clients to toe the Trump line: 21 percent of Americans strongly approve of the job he’s doing.
One in five. That’s the Trumphadi base. That’s a cult remnant, a rump of true believers rattling around a country that has judged this crapulous trainwreck of a President in full.
AP-NORC has him at 33 percent—eight points below where he stood in July of his first term. Three points below Joe Biden in July 2022, which, you’ll recall, was the number Republicans spent two years waving around as proof of a failed presidency. Trump is now underwater against the standard his own party set for failure.
The trendlines are a damning indictment. He was at minus 16.4 on July 12. Minus 20.6 by month’s end. This is a picture of constant, unstoppable erosion, and no matter how much Fox News his followers inhale, it’s not getting better.
The NYT chart below aggregates polls across the second term. No amount of curve-smoothing shows Trump’s approval going anywhere but down.
Why?
Well, it’s tempting but lazy to say, “Everything.”
Start with Iran, the war Trump launched in February and has spent five months losing.
AP-NORC finds 64 percent of Americans say the war has not been worth fighting. Reuters/Ipsos puts the approval rating for the strikes at 33 percent. Fox News, his own network’s polling, has disapproval of his handling of Iran at 66 percent, a record, with 56 percent of voters opposing the military action outright. At the end of the Vietnam War, with choppers lifting off the roof of the embassy, roughly 30 percent of Americans still backed the fight, and that was after 58,000 dead. Five months in, Trump’s war is polling at fall-of-Saigon levels.
But the number that should keep the White House up at night is this one: nearly 70 percent of Americans say Trump has never clearly explained what we’re doing there.
Of course, he hasn’t. There is no explanation other than his manifold pathologies and idiocy. There is only escalation, improvisation, and a Pentagon casualty tracking system playing games with the lives of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines.
And the base is cracking. Republican approval of his handling of Iran fell from 71 percent in June to 61 percent in July—ten points in a month, among his own voters, on a war he owns completely. I made ads for a living. You cannot spin a war that two-thirds of the country thinks was a mistake, and the commander-in-chief cannot describe.
The war hurts him. The economy wrecks him.
This is where I gently remind you that Trump only won by 1.5%. The nation is truly split in two and Trump is the most divisive of personalities. He doesn’t even give lip service to being a president for all the people, he doesn’t bother.
Trump is bleeding off support amongst moderate Republicans, largely because of said war and economy but also his insistence on having won the 2020 election is a turnoff in my view. Moderate Republicans want to leave all that nonsense behind, just like they would prefer to believe that January 6 never really happened. It’s a terrible look and Trump won’t let up on it. This is cratering support in a key voting bloc, which is not wise.
And don’t forget the tariffs and immigration. The tariffs are the bad idea that Trump simply won’t part with and as to immigration, Rick Wilson reports that 56% of those polled “disapprove of his immigration pogroms, a ten-point collapse since February. The mass deportation program is now net-negative, with independents opposing it 59 to 41. Marquette shows him underwater on both immigration and another former crown jewel in his arsenal: border security.”
These would all be glad tidings and I know what you’re thinking: “We’ve heard it all before and the guy is bullet-proof politically.” Not so. We beat him once in 2020 and we can beat all that he stands for in 2026 and 2028.
And in some corner of his feral brain, Trump knows it.
Trump is toxic snake oil, and a vain and self-promoting creator of a very ugly form of cheap and veneered, rolled in fake gold, political glitz.
He creates security threats and then markets them as distractions to his own, now thinning support base. On the same hand he will not take responsibility for having created any of the mess that now deleteriously exists, destroys and consumes. Nor will he reviee and take corrective actions that he cannot grift. He will, try to divide and conquer, with threats and vengeance, to win at any cost. He will blame others for his very predictable, corrosive and cancerous deceits – internationally and nationally. He repeats this over and over, because it’s his successful working formula of a con man. Just watch him do it again in the near future. However, and hopefully, his base of support is now thinning and concurrently sloughing to the point where both his pride and reputation sustain fatal blows – politically and brand. Hopefully.