President Trump got some decent news on the inflation and jobs front in the January data. There are signs that the January jobs number may just be a positive blip in an overall downcast trend from 2025. The cooling inflation numbers may be offset by price hikes from manufacturers who have been holding off on passing on tariff costs until the new year. Still, for a president with sinking popularity, those numbers are better than nothing. And yet, despite some nods to affordability, there’s really little evidence that Trump is in any way shifting course or doing anything likely to shift the downward pressure on public support which threatens to wash away Republicans’ congressional majorities in November. They made some nods to that in Minneapolis. But we can be confident now that it’s window dressing on a mass deportation program that remains intact and bounding forward. On the contrary, everything we see suggests a pedal-to-the-metal, double-down approach. The main effort focused on the election is not one focused on increasing public support but putting a thumb on the scales with the administration’s so-called SAVE Act to suppress the vote. Everything points to a collision between these two forces, Trump and the American public, in November.
A couple data points caught my attention in recent days. Axios has many shortcomings. But one thing it is very helpful with is knowing when some new idea or datapoint or news permeates the threshold of elite DC opinion. Yesterday they ran a piece about the looming midterms warning for the GOP. The first line of the piece is both arresting and provides some reassurance that the images of recent months have broken through to the public at large. It reads: “Nearly half of Americans would describe President Trump as ‘corrupt,’ ‘racist’ and ‘cruel’ in new polling full of midterm warning signs for Republicans.”
The growing focus on cruelty and corruption shows that Trump’s cratering public support isn’t just about tariff anxiety or affordability. The brutality and corruption of his government, the fulsome rejection of the civic democratic order are breaking through with a broad public. The public increasingly sees the reality of Trump’s rule, and a majority doesn’t like it.
For some time through the middle months of 2025, Trump’s public support was low and perhaps creeping down slowly. But overall the story was one of general stability. That changed about four months ago. Nate Silver’s Trump approval average today stands at 40.9%. G. Elliott Morris’s number (which I use as my canonical data point) is at 38.7%. Trump is now significantly below the abysmal public approval he had at this time in his first term, which is a genuine accomplishment.
It’s tempting to think that Trump has some secret plan to rig or overrule or maybe even cancel the election. But in fact it’s not a secret. He claims he’s going to “nationalize” the election, which actually just means putting his Republican friends in charge of counting the ballots in places he’s upset about losing in prior cycles. Maybe they’ll pass the SAVE Act, though Republicans would need to abolish the filibuster to do that. So that almost certainly isn’t happening.
I don’t think Trump’s plans are going to work. Especially if the opposition is vigilant. What seems more likely is that Trump is falling prey to that common peril of aging strongmen: he’s trapped in a bubble of his own making, in which he hears only the voices of lackeys and sycophants and — when it’s not one of those — people more committed to degenerate ideology than to Trump’s public approval. People like Stephen Miller for instance.
There’s a difference between public opinion and elite conventional wisdom. The latter has assumed for almost the entirety of the last year that Trump can do anything he wants and even get fairly unpopular and none of it matters. Trump can walk through fire, walk on water. He’s unsinkable. The last decade has certainly given us plenty of reasons to be wary of counting Trump out. But that confidence in unstoppability which permeates Trump’s world and most of elite D.C. opinion has clearly convinced Trump and most of his inner circle that he can, quite simply, do anything he wants. But the American public doesn’t seem to agree. And at least D.C. conventional wisdom, if not the White House, seems only now to be waking up to the fact that a broad and intense backlash is brewing against Trump’s war not only on his political opposition but on American liberty itself.