Member Newsletter
As I noted over the weekend, the arrival of Trump’s 100th day in office (April 30th), has been greeted by a raft of terrible polls. Most of the premium pollsters have fielded a poll to coincide with the 100 days milestone. The results range from approval in the low 40s to the very high 30s. Two put Trump’s approval number at 39%. His disapproval ranges from the mid to the high 50s. In response, there has been a predictable chorus that polls, or public opinion itself, simply doesn’t matter anymore. That’s either because Trump won’t face the electorate again, or because there won’t be elections again, or that there won’t be fair elections if they’re held, etc. The overarching argument is that public opinion doesn’t matter anymore because we’re no longer in the “normal” political space we’re used to.
This is categorically false, a basic misunderstanding of what politics even is.
It’s absolutely true that we’re no longer in the “normal” politics that every living American was raised with. But the other conclusion is categorically wrong. Politics doesn’t stop just because the President says it does or even when he’s in the midst of an attempted authoritarian takeover. Politics continues. Public opinion, if anything, becomes even more important. Because public opinion is the ultimate referee in all great matters of state.
It is very difficult to overthrow a civic democracy or subvert it into an electoral autocracy without a substantial amount of public support and/or withdrawal from politics. This is why Trump’s tariff actions and to an extent his DOGE campaign have been so misguided, from the perspective of his own interests as a would-be autocrat. Every would-be autocrat does two things: he or she keeps the “power ministries” and the pensioners on side. You also do everything you can to keep the economy humming, at least until your power is well-secured. With the exception of ICE, which is a deeply Trumpy organization, he’s really failed to do that. Indeed, with the economy he’s taken numerous affirmative steps almost guaranteed to do the opposite.
Public opinion matters a lot because public opinion is the ultimate decider, especially when it becomes lopsided against the government. It encourages more people to express their opposition and it makes the would-be autocrat’s supporters doubt he is strong enough to protect them from electoral backlash or even to remain in power.
This is one of the big reasons why I actually thought Trump would find a reason to shelve the tariffs, even though they are perhaps one of the few things he deeply believes in. It would have been so easy to simply let Biden’s economy ride and juice it with tax cuts. The fact that he didn’t do that has made it much more difficult to sustain his other goals.
This is also the big Achilles heel in all of Trump’s trade fights. His attacks have united target nations and divided his own. Foreign countries can read our press and look at our politics as well as we can. It’s crystal clear to everyone that Trump is isolated politically on tariffs. If you’re in Europe or China or even Canada, you can’t look at the situation in the U.S. and not think, “I like our odds.”
One thing that makes true autocracies so brittle is that there’s very little early warning when the regime in losing public support or building up a critical mass of opposition. The regime makes people quiet because that reduces opposition and makes it difficult for public opposition to become fully aware of itself. But quiet works both ways. It makes it hard for the regime to know what’s happening, too. A galvanizing incident happens and suddenly people are in the streets.
One feature of the explosion of print in the 16th century is that print in a way creates the thing we call “the people,” a community of individuals and communities, most of whom will never know each other, who become aware of themselves as a group, with similar interests, aims, experiences, etc. Polls play some of this roll in modern societies. Indeed, they accelerate the perception of it, in good ways and bad. You think you’re one person thinking something but in fact you share those views with many others, perhaps even a majority of the political community. Or maybe what you thought was a common belief actually isn’t.
One thing I’ve seen over the last three months is how often elites seem out of sync with public opinion. In a way, that happened in the first days after the election when the election was interpreted as a sea-change and decisive move to the right, notwithstanding the razor-thin margin. But since then, if you watch the establishment press, the business community, a decent amount of civil society (often by remaining quiet) and even the equities markets before early April, you’d get the sense that Trump was moving from strength to strength. He was elected on a platform and he’s imposing that platform. The powerful people are cutting deals with him. Doubts about Trumpism were settled by the 2024 election. Trump commands it and it happens. Trump is, if nothing else, a master at performances of strength and dominance. And elites tend to be highly pliable in the face of that.
The only discordant note we see are those moments when Republicans hold in person town halls. Suddenly we get a very different version of reality. Mainstream media has routinely dismissed those events as just diehard liberals venting their opposition. And it’s certainly true that most of those voices probably didn’t vote for Trump last year. But that’s just special pleading. That’s always the case in any sort of public opposition. When you see events like this consistently in extremely conservative districts, it means opponents are emboldened and expanding their numbers. Just as much, it means supporters are demoralized or shifting their views. If it’s really just Democrats and liberals, where are the right wingers? They can certainly show up, especially after word gets out that these town halls are damaging. The question answers itself.
With these polls we see what we should expect: that Trump has wildly overinterpreted his mandate to the extent he had one and is driving an immense backlash. The opposers are the majority, in some polls approaching 60% of the population. When people realize this, opposers become more likely to speak out, to take stands, to have confidence that they may in fact be on the winning side.