Trump's honeymoon won't last
Unfortunately, Americans are in for a rude awakening.
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This is a very bleak moment for the United States and the world.
Donald Trump takes office today promising to immediately start in on a litany of human rights abuses and other efforts to harm marginalized people. He’s promised a sweeping assault on immigrants in Chicago starting as early as this week. He’s said he will said he will sign executive orders to make trans people second class citizens (and effectively deny their existence). In recent days he’s indicated that he’s going to take his corrupt self-dealing to new levels by promoting numerous shady crypto schemes that will enrich himself and his family. And of course he’s pledged to pardon those convicted of violence associated with the January 6 coup attempt, reiterating his disdain for democracy and the rule of law.
The oncoming cruelty and horror is bad enough. But almost as painful has been the shameful rush by media, Democrats, and others who should know better to accommodate, palliate, and genuflect to the president-elect. It feels like those who oppose Trump, and those who he is about to target, have been abandoned by institutions and allies alike. The widespread resistance of 2017 appears to have vanished in a fetid wave of spinelessness.
It's difficult to find much cause for hope right now. There is one mild glimmer of good news, though. The enthusiasm for Trump almost certainly won’t last.
Trump has never had high approval ratings, in part because most of his policies are ill-thought out at best and deeply unpopular at worst. The beginning of a term is usually a honeymoon period when voters and other politicians give the president the benefit of the doubt. But that honeymoon is generally short, and there’s plenty of reason to believe that with Trump it will be even shorter.
The great nonresistance
The drumbeat of knees hitting the floor as Trump prepares to take office has been relentless and nauseating. Even before Trump won the election, Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of the Washington Post, spiked his paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. Billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the Los Angeles Times, did the same at his paper.
Since Trump’s victory, media oligarchs have accelerated the pace of their disgrace. As we chronicled in this newsletter, ABC doled out $16 million to settle an absurdly weak defamation lawsuit Trump brought against the network for George Stephanopoulos’s (accurate) coverage of the E. Jean Carroll case. The Washington Post killed an editorial cartoon by Pulitzer Prize winner Ann Telnaes which depicted Bezos and other oligarchs prostrate before Trump (Telnaes, honorably, quit). Mark Zuckerberg, billionaire CEO of Meta, ended factchecking to appease Trump and his movement, which thrives on lies. Meta also carefully removed anti-LGBTQ hate speech policies, since again Trump supports hatred of and discrimination directed towards LGBTQ people.
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Many Democrats, too, have been eager to besmirch themselves in the name of Trump and Trumpism. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis rushed to praise nightmare anti-vax goon and conspiracy theorist RFK Jr., who Trump has terrifyingly nominated to be secretary of health and human services (HHS). Maine Rep. Jared Golden has called for Democrats to support Trump’s economy-crushing, xenophobic tariff regime. Democratic Senate Minority leader Chuck Schumer popped up to say Democrats could work with Trump on his half-brained, nativist scheme to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.”
Worst of all, Sens. Ruben Gallego and John Fetterman cosponsored the Laken Riley Act, a brutal anti-immigrant bill that mandates detention of undocumented people who are even accused of a crime. It’s a dystopian attack on due process — but that did not deter 10 Democratic senators from joining Republicans to advance it. The House still needs to vote on the Senate version, but Trump will likely be able to sign it in his first days in office.
Of course, Republicans like Sen. Joni Ernst have also abandoned any semblance of principle to vote for Trump’s unqualified nominees. Celebrities like Snoop Dogg, who have criticized Trump in the past, lined up to perform at his inauguration. Even voters seem to have forgotten everything they knew about Trump. His favorability was -8.6 on the day of the election. Now it’s only -1.1, according to 538.
Trump will lose again
The context here, of course, is that Trump just won a presidential election. That win was narrow, but definite.
Media leaders feel like Trump is a voice of the people, and they don’t want to annoy his followers, lose access, or be targeted for harassment by his administration. Democrats feel like Trump is the voice of the people, and they want to be more like Trump in hopes of maybe poaching his voters. Voters, for their part, like to feel optimistic at the start of a presidential term, and tell themselves that maybe this guy will be better this time, even when it’s obvious he won’t. And none of this is helped by the widespread recognition that Trump may use the federal government to personally target anyone who defies him.
Trump’s mandate wasn’t especially clear or impressive. But whenever a president wins, people tend to think he’s got some magical ability to channel the will of the voters. The fact that Trump as a candidate was so obviously unfit — he was convicted of 34 felonies just months before the election — only intensifies his aura of invulnerability.
But honeymoons don’t last, and we have a lot of experience with Trump indicating that his, in particular, won’t. Trump entered his first term with slightly positive approval ratings, but a month in he was already six points underwater, and things only got worse for him from there.
This wasn’t some sort of accident. Trump tends to be unpopular because he has no discipline, no knowledge of or interest in good government, and supports wildly unpopular policies. His first year in office during his first term was defined by his unpopular Muslim ban, his failed effort to repeal the ACA and strip healthcare from tens of millions of Americans, and the Unite The Right rally, when he referred to rioting neo-Nazis as “very fine people.”
Republicans are gearing up to push more unpopular policies and create more chaos and ugly stories of human rights abuses. In the abstract, people often say that they like the idea of deporting undocumented immigrants. But when people hear stories about actual individuals Trump is likely to deport — an “undocumented community volunteer who has lived in the US for 10 years and has no criminal record,” for example, or “an undocumented person who has lived in the US for 15 years and has US-born children” — deportations garner less than 25 percent support, according to surveys by Data for Progress.
Similarly, people enjoy the nativist rush when Trump boasts about high tariffs. But they are unlikely to be enthusiastic when our main trading partners escalate a trade war, inflation spirals, and we end up in a miserable recession. And it goes without saying that slashing Social Security benefits, as per Republican plans, is going to be mightily unpopular — as will be any push to repeal the ACA or cut Medicare, both of which are very much on the table as Republicans try to figure out a way to pay for more tax cuts for the rich.
In short, the nimbus of good feeling around Trump is unsustainable, for the straightforward reason that Trump is still Trump, the guy who has had dire approval ratings for virtually his entire 10-year public political career.
Unpopularity won’t save us. But it will help with the spines.
Trump’s unpopularity won’t prevent him from doing a lot of horrible things, just as it didn’t prevent him from doing many horrible things in his first term. It’s very likely that many of those horrible things will be extremely unpopular, though, and that unpopularity will, at the least, make it easier for Democrats to find their spines ahead of next year’s midterms.
There’s even a decent chance that as Trump becomes more toxic, ghoulish oligarchs like Zuckerberg and Bezos will be less eager to be so closely associated with him — as they backed away from him after January 6.
Trump is also likely to lose a lot of midterm elections, just as he lost badly in 2017, 2018, and 2019. These losses have, in fact, already started. Though it didn’t get much buzz, Democrats held onto control of the Virginia House and Senate by winning two special elections, running about a point ahead of Kamala Harris in both. Republicans held onto a third seat — but the candidate underperformed Trump by 9 points. That seems like a hopeful sign for resisting Trump going forward.
It will take time for Trump to discredit himself again. It will take time for Democratic wins in specials and midterms to remind politicians, journalists, and the public just how vulnerable Trump is, and how much he hurts Republicans downballot. In the meantime, though, there are still an awful lot of us who know who Trump is and continue to oppose him.
Keep calling your representatives. Keep donating to abortion funds, immigration orgs, and other institutions that are still fighting the good fight. Keep speaking out. It feels like everyone has abandoned the cause, but they have not — and there others who may be checked out for now that Trump will alienate again. He’s not good at much, but he’s good at that.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
Those of us who are the opposition are still mourning, taking a break from our outrage, and trying to live our lives right now. It has been EXHAUSTING trying to fight this movement. To stay sane, many of us still can’t talk about the election. So please be patient.
Trump is a front-man carnival barker & nothing more. He’s not good at anything. Each EO was written by somebody; who was it and how are they connected to the broligarchs? Please start sidelining TFG for coverage of the horrible cabinet members who work for the Heritage Foundation and religious groups. He’s the biggest smoke & mirrors operation ever executed. Don’t fall for it. Treat TFG like the ‘paid spokesperson’ he is.