In a healthy democracy, public opinion can be understood as a type of barometer that elected officials use to calibrate their agendas and behaviors. When policies or actions are unpopular, presidents often pivot and change. If their agenda proves popular, those “single-minded seekers of reelection” will likely do more of it.
And then there’s Donald Trump.
Six months into his second term, recent polls have shown a significant drop in the president’s numbers. The latest Economist/YouGov poll, released on Tuesday and covering the period of July 18-21, finds that just 41% of Americans approve of Trump’s performance in office, while 55% disapprove. With a difference of minus 14%, his net approval is deeply underwater, marking “a record low for his second term, and is also lower than approval of Trump for most of his first term.” The survey also shows widespread levels of net disapproval over a range of issues, including inflation and prices (-29%), jobs and the economy (-12%), foreign policy (-11%) and immigration (-6%).
Other surveys bear out these findings. A recent poll from Gallup shows even starker numbers on Trump’s handling of immigration. While 35% of Americans approve of his policies, a whopping 62% disapprove of his performance on the issue. Surveys have also shown growing worry and concern about the administration’s assaults on the rule of law, disregard for the Constitution and civil rights, and overall hostility to multiracial pluralistic democracy and social progress more broadly.
Trump won, at least in part, in 2024 by expanding his support among Latinos and other nonwhite voters. Six months into his second term, Trump’s support among Latino voters has dropped from approximately 50% to 30%. He is also losing support among Black and brown people more broadly, as well as young men.
When faced with sinking numbers, past presidents have often changed course, sometimes in significant ways…Donald Trump is a different character altogether.
When faced with sinking numbers, past presidents have often changed course, sometimes in significant ways. After Barack Obama’s approval rating declined in 2010, resulting in a “shellacking” for Democrats in that year’s midterms, he amplified his message on job creation and the economy, and highlighted his efforts at reducing the federal deficit. Bill Clinton, one of the most popular and successful presidents in American history, pivoted multiple times, most notably when he was forced to abandon his plan for universal health care due to its unpopularity. After sinking poll numbers ahead of and after the 1994 midterms, he recovered and won reelection in 1996. Ronald Reagan, who was once deified by American conservatives, saw his approval ratings plummet from 63% to 47% in December 1986 following news of the Iran-Contra scandal. He finally gave a televised address in March 1987 in which he appeared to accept limited responsibility for the situation — and his numbers slowly began to rebound.
Donald Trump is a different character altogether. Instead of modifying his course like his predecessors, Trump is continuing — and in some cases even escalating — his unpopular policies. This is the man who proclaimed “I alone can fix it,” a claim he continues to believe. His view of himself, at least in public settings, is that of an infallible, almost deific, figure. Following last year’s assassination attempt in Butler, Pa., he has come to believe he was “saved by God” for a divine purpose: “I’d like to think God thinks I’m going to straighten out our country.”
Trump’s refusal to change course in response to public opinion does not exist in a vacuum. It reflects a much larger autocratic trend by the American right, whose anti-majoritarian strategy and ideology includes voter suppression and nullification, gerrymandering and the repeal of birthright citizenship, as well as using the courts and “dark money” to ignore the public will on a range of issues such as women’s reproductive rights, separation of church and state, health, education, science and gun violence. As we recently saw in what was allegedly a politically-motivated shooting in Minnesota that killed a Democratic lawmaker, her husband and dog, and injured two others, it appears some MAGA supporters even support political violence to achieve their political goals.
In the U.S., like other countries, the ideal of how a democracy should function in theory continues to be challenged by the reality of how it actually functions in practice. For most of our history, America was a racialized democracy where Black people and other non-whites, to varying degrees and in different ways, were not included as equal citizens with white people. Until 1851, property-less white men could not vote in many parts of the country. White women were not given suffrage until the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920. The United States has only been a full de jure democracy for approximately 60 years, since the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in 1964 and 1965.
Now Trump is taking the basic norm — that in a democracy, elected officials are supposed to be responsive to public opinion — and shattering it. Since his inauguration six months ago, a trend has emerged: The more successful Trump is in advancing his agenda, the more unpopular he and those policies are among the American people. To state it even more plainly, the president is demonstrating his open contempt for what Americans want.
This fact has caused extreme consternation among the general public, the responsible political class and the mainstream news media about how this centuries-old system has been short-circuited, if not wholly broken. As Russian dissident Garry Kasparov explained during a recent interview with The Atlantic, “A common problem for citizens of the free world is that they do not have the vocabulary to understand authoritarian regimes and leaders. They expect their own terms and experiences to translate, when often they are meaningless or even contrary.”
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Kasparov’s point is important — and alarming. Trump, his officials and the larger MAGA movement are responding to the president’s drop in approval ratings not by recalibrating their policies to win more public support, but by embracing a logic with a chilling endpoint: The possibility that any election they do not win will be, by their definition, illegitimate and should be nullified. This would be a retreat to an earlier era in our history; by their definition, the only votes that should count are the ones from their supporters, who are mostly white, right-wing Christians.
Here it’s important to note that autocratic leaders like Trump do not wholly reject public opinion. They impose their will on the public through such means as propaganda, disinformation and conspiracism, and then they shape public opinion to serve their corrupt goals. This is a key way of maintaining a veneer of legitimacy and manufacturing consent.
By now, Trump’s playbook is familiar. When he encounters strong resistance from, for example, the courts and the public, he appears to back down, which buys time to regroup and find other ways to advance his agenda. Or, Trump and his spokespeople “flood the zone” with distractions. Most recently, they have been doing this to deflect attention from the Justice Department’s refusal to release the files on convicted sex offender — and Trump’s one-time friend — Jeffrey Epstein, in which the president is allegedly named multiple times. (Being named in the files does not necessarily imply evidence of wrongdoing.) Over the past week, Trump has baselessly accused former President Barack Obama of treason over the 2016 presidential election. The president has resumed his old attacks on Hillary Clinton, and he mused about stripping comedian Rosie O’Donnell of her American citizenship. On Monday, he threatened to oppose the construction of a new football stadium in Washington, D.C., unless the Commanders, the NFL team who will be headquartered there, revert to their racist “Redskins” moniker.
With few exceptions, Democrats, the media and the public almost always dutifully take the bait. So far, Trump’s polling floor seems to remain similar to the level of his first term. As Carroll Doherty points out in POLITICO Magazine, his numbers “fluctuated a mere 6 points — from 38 to 44 percent — during his first three years in office.” (His lowest-ever rating came as he left the White House in the wake of the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol, when it stood at 34%.)
At least for now, he remains buoyed by his followers, who have an almost unbreakable devotion to him and the MAGA movement. “He has always had a low ceiling,” Doherty writes, “constrained by the single-digit approval he gets from Democrats and independents who lean Democratic. But he also has a high floor, thanks to the steady, 80 percent-plus support he invariably receives from the GOP base.”
This trend is not surprising. Autocrats and other authoritarians are often very popular among members of the public who are attracted to the strongman persona and the energy of the personality cult. As leading GOP pollster Frank Luntz warned in a recent interview, “I don’t think Trump cares, because to him, the only — his priority are his voters. And we’ve never had that before either. Someone who says, I’m really not president of the whole country. I’m president of the people who voted for me, and I’m going to damn well ensure that they get what they voted for.”
In the end, Donald Trump views himself as the embodiment of the state, the Final Word, with no accountability to the democratic will, needs and desires of the American people (except, perhaps, when they show adoration and support for him). Unfortunately, we are quickly finding out that public opinion ultimately matters little when a president refuses to ever be held truly accountable by long-held norms, elections, institutions and other democratic means.
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