I wanted to take a moment today to highlight something that to me, at least, is behind a certain uncanny quality to the summer of 2025. Two things, which point in two entirely different directions, are happening at the same time. Every day you can find in the news a new example of the president cutting funding (either by legal or extra-legal means) or asserting direct control over funding in order to entrench his direct personal power. This might be defunding universities, ending funding of public broadcasting, or anything in between. He’s now opened criminal probes into numerous public officials. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) continues to expand its war not only against the undocumented and legal residents but also against self-government in major American (blue) cities. I could mention dozens of other examples but the simplest overview is that the president continues to expand and entrench his authoritarian vision of rule, in which the whole machinery of government exists to impose his will and battle his enemies, with courts that are mostly but not always compliant.
At the same time, the public rejection of these policies has grown in jaunty tandem with Trump’s grinding opposition to them. He and his policies are now extraordinarily unpopular, with quality polls now frequently showing disapproval in the high fifties and support in the very low forties. The New York Times now shows his average at 54% disapproval, 44% approval. G. Elliott Morris’ Strength in Numbers data has 54.3% and 42.6%. There’s an important additional detail to these numbers. There have been two peaks in Trump’s second term unpopularity. The first came during the public and market panic over his draconian tariffs. After he paused most of those, the market rebounded and public opposition cooled slightly. Then another surge in opposition started roughly in time with stepped-up ICE enforcement aiming at 3,000 detentions a day. There’s even what looks like the beginnings of another spike in the last couple weeks which might be some atmospheric effect of the Epstein story but that’s uncertain. It continues to rise. Americans disapprove of the President’s policies in every area often by deep and stark margins. 23 point net opposition on prices and inflation; 17 points on jobs and economy; 14 points net opposition on deportations, per G. Elliott Morris.
The standard line I hear when anyone notes these numbers is that it doesn’t appear to be having any impact. Who cares what people think if he keeps doing whatever he wants? Then there’s the more extreme and doomier line: that only matters if there are more elections and why do you think there will be more elections? For reasons I’ve explained at length in other posts I have essentially zero patience for that second line. But in the present, the first one is accurate, or mostly so. Trump reacted and pulled back temporarily on his tariffs in response to steep opposition and even panic in the public and the markets. But that was the exception. Trump’s policy actions and the public’s reaction to them are like two ships crossing in the night, intensifying each other and yet appearing to have little impact on each other.
Part of my reason for writing this post is that I don’t think elite discourse or much of the news has taken much or sufficient account of just how deep this opposition seems to run. It’s also because the whole moment — maybe starting about six weeks ago — has a weird, liminal uncanny quality. It’s like we’re in some transitional moment, about to hit some new reality but not quite yet, where something has to give. But again, not quite yet. To capture the current drift of public opinion, Trump is near the disapproval levels Biden was at on the eve of his catastrophic debate performance in June 2024. That was after three and a half years. Trump is at six months. For another benchmark, one of the polling trends of recent months is that approval on “immigration” has become wholly untethered from support on “deportations,” militarized law enforcement, and other issues that are usually classified with it. “Immigration” includes things like border security where Trump’s policies have remained relatively popular. But even there, on his signature issue, Trump is not only underwater but the public trusts Democrats more than Trump. On inflation and prices, where Trump probably won the election, his support is just over 25%.
It’s one of my governing beliefs that you can’t transform a state like the American republic from a civic democracy to an autocracy or competitive authoritarianism if a substantial majority of the population opposes it. And there’s no question that substantial opposition is what we’re seeing. When do these two forces come into conflict? Maybe only with the 2026 elections. That may begin with the substantial number of off year elections which are often viewed as harbingers for the following year’s election, things like the gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia. But I think we will also see it, more ominously, in greater attacks on the sovereignty of blue states and cities. Politico reported that ICE now plans to “flood the zone” with its officers in New York City after the city council rejected its demand to open offices in local jails. This move will likely (and by design) become intertwined with the city’s already hyper-polarized mayoral election. Indeed, I suspect that the White House is especially eager to go to war with New York City with Zohran Mamdani as the poster boy for that war — both pre-election and especially post-election, assuming he’s elected. Meanwhile some national Democrats worry that Mamdani could allow Trump to polarize the electorate in his favor going into 2026. Maybe there’s some chance of that happening. I’m skeptical. But in any case the issue isn’t just in New York City. It’s something Trump wants in cities across blue America.
What’s clear is that Trump has no intention of tamping down the politics of provocation and aggression toward domestic enemies. It’s against both his political goals and his temperament. It’s just as clear that these policies are driving ever greater levels not only of opposition but intense opposition. The confrontations we’re likely to see clearly scare a lot of Democratic elected officials. And there are good reasons to be scared. We’re talking about confrontations in which President Trump has control over the US military, federal law enforcement and an increasingly brazen and lawless ICE. There’s lots to be scared of. But this whole public drama — the contest over the future of civic democracy in the United States — has always been fundamentally a battle over public opinion. And looking at the lay of the land, there’s little reason to believe further confrontations will do anything but intensify and deepen current opposition.