Good goals but troubling execution
President Trump needs to get his team executing his plans better in order to prevent a GOP wipeout in 2026 and 2028
The brilliant
included an interesting chart in his “Six-Chart Sunday” posting yesterday:
In particular, the chart of opinions of DOGE (essentially that people believed it was trying to address a real problem but that it wasn’t doing it well) pointed to something undoubtedly true, at least among the subset of Trump voters (and even non-Trump voters who aren’t Trump haters): Unless you’re part of the “he can do no wrong” Trump base, many Americans share and support the president’s goals but have concerns about the administration’s methods and appearance of chaos and occasional overreach.
Here’s an example from Sunday: U.S. citizen children, including 4-year-old with cancer, deported to Honduras, legal advocates say
A couple of kids who are American citizens were “deported” or “sent” (depending on which reporter you read) to Honduras with their mother who was an illegal immigrant. I don’t know what’s true and what’s not but the story seems to be that the father (whom I presume is either American or a legal immigrant) petitioned to keep the kids but the mother wanted to keep them with her. (Sounds like maybe the two aren’t married and she has custody but again I just don’t know.) Given that the woman chose to take the kids with her, the administration argues (and not entirely unreasonably) that the kids weren’t actually deported.
In fact, “Border Czar” Tom Homan gave some very strong comments in a White House press briefing just this morning in which he noted, again not unreasonably, that if the children who left the country with their deported mother would have been kept in the US, Dems and the media would have been screaming “Trump is separating families again!”
The problem with the administration’s mostly reasonable argument is that it’s still going to look terrible to ordinary Americans who just read or hear the headlines in the formerly-mainstream press who take every opportunity to make Team Trump look aggressive, lawless, and just downright mean. I mean, how many reporters will write about the kids being “deported” or “sent” but not write about Homan’s on-point remarks?
It’s obviously true that those same “journalists” would rarely of never treat a Democrat that way. Indeed, we just lived through four years of those “journalists” doing everything they could to avoid speaking even the plainest truths about Joe Biden. But complaining about liberal bias in old-line media is like complaining about a puppy peeing on your rug. It’s just what they do.
The difference, of course, is that you can clean up after a puppy. It’s pretty hard to clean up after that media bias because the people who made the mess never come to clean it up themselves and even if they did people will remember the mess more than its later absence. (This is why I’m president of the Bad Analogy Club.)
When you know the umpires are against you, you simply can’t commit major penalties that give them the chance to throw the flag or give the coach a technical foul. (I intentionally used terminology from four different sports there and I’m kinda proud of myself.)
Another example of the same issue is noted in this morning’s note from John Ellis in which he notes a NY Times question asking people what word best describes Trump’s second term. The top answers were “chaotic” and “scary”. Again, I realize that lots of Trump voters disagree, especially with that second characterization. But Trump voters alone were not enough to elect Trump, much less to elect (or re-elect) a different Republican president or a Republican member of the House or Senate in a purple/swing district.
Trump, despite all his trolling of Dems, is not running for a third term. And since he’s not really a Republican it’s unclear that he cares very much about the political fortunes of Republicans. But he cares a lot about his legacy and he well understands that just as he made every effort to undo as many Obama executive actions as he could, Biden then did the same to Trump. Now Trump is doing it back to Biden. But Trump won’t want a Democrat to get elected in 2028 and undo whatever Trump may see as his legacy. So he has to care a little.
And, again, despite his base thinking everything’s going fine, it just isn’t: Trump has lowest 100-day approval rating in 80 years: POLL - ABC News
And it’s not just one poll: Trump's approval rating drops; voters have doubts on economy: Polls
Probably the scariest part for Republicans is that Trump’s numbers have absolutely cratered on the two issues that really got him elected: the economy and immigration.
He’s also more than 20 points underwater in approval on the issue of the Ukraine war where normal people who don’t buy into Tucker Carlson’s pro-Russia insanity realize that Trump has so far sided with a dictator and killer who hates America and who started the war, over an imperfect but democratizing and West-facing former Soviet Republic. It’s a moral failing of the first order and Americans know it.
Republicans who plan to run for office in 2026 or 2028 must be wishing that the president would stop the madness with trade wars and implement immigration enforcement, which most Americans support, with less chaos.
My prediction is that Trump will rein things in a little, but only a little. He still doesn’t like or understand international trade. He still wants very aggressive enforcement actions against illegal aliens, whereas I suspect the public would prefer very aggressive action against those illegals who have committed at least moderately serious crimes while in the country and not so much against people here doing the best they can trying to make a better life for themselves. The main thing people want is a border that’s under control.
Trump will never do anything that looks like backing down which makes course correction even more challenging. But if he’s convinced he needs to change, he is capable of finding a way by/while claiming that he’s changing because he already won. He could probably make that claim already regarding the border and immigration even as there are still many thousands of criminals to deport. He can’t easily make it with trade because so far there are no new trade deals he can point to but I suspect that will change. Trump should grab those “wins” eagerly even if the new deals are almost the same as the old deals. After all, that’s what he did with USMCA which is nearly identical to NAFTA but which Trump trump-eted as if it were a complete overhaul of North American trade rules.
I hope I’m wrong, not because I love Republicans but because this Democratic Party is so radically leftist and, frankly, unintelligent, that their last two presidential candidates were Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Talk about “Dumb and Dumber”.
And it’s critically important to note — as so many seem to forget — that an election is a choice. It’s manifestly not just about how people feel about Trump or any other one politician or party. After all, Trump was widely unpopular and still won in 2024. Why? Because an election is a choice and the cackling alternative was so shockingly unacceptable, even more so than the unlikable phone-smasher from 8 years earlier. I mean, Kamala was so bad that Trump actually won the national popular vote which a Republican hadn’t done in 20 years.
So it’s not impossible for Republicans to win in 2028 but it will only happen, at least if Trump doesn’t turn things around quickly, if Dems are mindless enough to pick another truly terrible candidate. Perhaps they should stop just picking a woman for the sake of doing so, which has failed them both times they’ve done it. (I’m not saying don’t pick any woman, but don’t pick the worst one available because you’ve proven that that’s the surest way to lose to someone you should have beaten twice.)
For Trump and the GOP to succeed going forward, and assuming that Trump won’t actually just say “never mind” about all the trade wars, it’s incumbent on him (if you’ll pardon the pun) to try to run a government that seems competent and under control, even if aggressive. So far, the chaos is dominating how people view this administration.
Finally: you’ll know when the polling is really starting to bite when you see Republican members of Congress publicly disagreeing with Donald Trump on policy. This won’t happen a lot and won’t happen in very red districts because they’ll be more afraid of a primary than of losing in a general election. But in districts that Biden won or in the few swing districts remaining in this country, Republicans will have a hard decision to make about whether or how much to continue to back Trump if the public is backing away from him.
One good example of a Republican House member who has to thread a very skinny needle is Colorado’s freshman representative Gabe Evans (CO-8) who won a narrow victory in one of the nation’s most competitive seats. He recently came out in support of tariffs with his thought apparently being that the threat of tariffs might cause other countries to drop tariff and non-tariff barriers to the many types of agricultural products grown/raised on farms and ranches in his district: Citing agriculture, U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans praises Trump tariffs - Axios Denver It’s not a ridiculous position to take, especially if you believe that Trump really will force down other nation’s barriers to trade and then eliminate new American tariffs. But it’s a district that also includes quite a bit of northern Denver suburbs where voters will see much less potential upside.
On the other side of the state, another freshman Republican, Jeff Hurd (CO-3), who also has a very rural district, has taken a different approach: Colorado Republican Jeff Hurd leads bipartisan legislation to check Trump's power to impose tariffs | Colorado In DC | coloradopolitics.com
It’s interesting in that comparison to see the House member in the safer seat to be more cautious about support of tariffs, though he has not actually come out against them. Instead, he’s making the constitutionally sound point that the president shouldn’t (and arguably doesn’t; we’ll soon see in court cases) have the authority to impose sweeping tariffs on his own authority. Unsurprisingly, he’s not getting much support from fellow Republicans. Spineless members of Congress almost never want to restrain executive power, even if it comes from usurping Congress (which is often too happy to be usurped because they don’t want the responsibility of making hard decisions), especially when the president is a member of their own party. It’s as if they never took an oath of office; I’m proud of Jeff Hurd for standing up for his oath.
OK, that’s enough for today. Bottom line is this: Most Americans share Donald Trump’s stated goals of reshoring at least some manufacturing (I think it’s mostly a fool’s errand, but could work a little bit in high-value production, not t-shirts), of significantly reducing inflation (which, especially with food prices, hasn’t happened yet despite Trump’s claims), of controlling the border and deporting illegal alien criminals, and of being a bit less of the world’s policeman. Trump and team need to find ways to execute on those goals without having the positive message of their achievements overwhelmed by negative stories about chaos and deported kids.