President Trump’s first two months back in the Oval Office have been a whirlwind of unprecedented executive action. This has predictably ignited forceful reactions from Democrats and their allies in the mainstream media, attacks which nevertheless have yet to significantly politically damage the president. But that is not where the threat to Trump comes from. The real danger to his legacy lies in his own temptation to ignore the national centre in favour of the most hard-core elements of his base.
This week’s special election defeat in Wisconsin’s state Supreme Court race for the Trump-backed candidate, Brad Schimel, is not cause for immediate worry. Democrats have turned out in greater numbers in special elections throughout the Trump era, rendering them poor guides to partisan general elections, and Wisconsin’s results mirror that long-term trend.
Plus, Trump’s job approval rating remains historically high for him at about 48 percent, only half a point lower than in early February. The share of Americans who believe the country is on the right track is also at its highest for decades, save for a brief period in early 2021 after the Covid vaccine became broadly available. Given America’s high level of political polarisation and the degree of vitriol regularly spewed at Trump and his team, these figures indicate that Trump has mostly maintained his support and remains politically strong.
There is nonetheless a growing trend that suggests this might change. Trump is increasingly pushing a raft of policies that appeal mostly to his already-committed base. Tariffs on allies, annexing Canada, and a slash-and-burn approach to the federal budget: such measures excite MAGA World but raise serious concerns among the moderate middle, whose votes sent Trump back to the Oval Office.
If Trump continues down this road, he runs the risk of doing exactly what each of his predecessors have done for the past 30-plus years. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Joe Biden: each leader won by ostentatiously appealing to the centre, only to tack hard to the Left or Right once safely in office or, in Bush’s case, re-elected. The presidents’ parties always suffered as a result, either relinquishing control of Congress in horrific midterm losses, or failing to keep hold of the White House.
This is Trump’s potentially fatal temptation. If he can resist playing to the partisan base, he could go into the 2026 midterms in position to expand GOP control and dominance. If he succumbs, however, 2026 could be a year that will live in Republican infamy.
Trump’s rise and resurrection are largely due to the continued failures of more mainstream politicians. America entered the post-Cold War era on top of the world as the only global superpower. It has yet inexorably declined, losing wars it chose to fight in Afghanistan and Iraq. Its trade policies created the rival power, Communist China, that Washington now fears. Those same policies led to the deindustrialisation that fuelled the working class’s shift to the Right. Progressive social policy has shattered America’s social consensus, and mass immigration has both pushed Americans even further apart and heightened the economic pressure on the native-born working class.
Those failures, common across the democratic West, have been magnified by a peculiar American failure. Every president since Clinton’s 1992 victory has campaigned as someone who represented the forgotten centre of public opinion. Each in power has instead turned their backs on those promises and the voters who placed their trust in them.
The likes of George W. Bush and Barack Obama instead used their political capital to prioritise issues and stances favoured by their party bases. Instead of brining Americans together, these unexplained about-faces pushed them apart and contributed to the steady rise of distrust in institutions and mainstream politicians.
Clinton set the pattern. He campaigned against incumbent President George H.W. Bush as a “new Democrat”, someone who could reform welfare, reduce crime, and stand up to his party’s Left. Clinton took office with large Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress as the country endorsed his interpretation of the Reagan legacy.
He instead moved sharply to the Left once inaugurated. His initial budget included a tax on energy that would have punished ordinary Americans. He sought to allow gays and lesbians to openly serve in the military at a time when homosexuality was still largely disfavoured. Most important, he tried to create a universal health system that would have dramatically upended care for everyone.
This was not what Americans thought they were voting for when they backed the charismatic young Arkansas governor. They gave him a historically sharp rebuke in the 1994 midterms, returning the GOP to Senate control and giving Republicans a majority in the House for the first time in half a century.
George W. Bush ultimately followed the same course. He campaigned in 2000 as a “uniter, not a divider”, and originally followed on that course. The 9/11 attack shifted his and the country’s focus from domestic to foreign policy, and the seeming victory in the war versus Iraq allowed him to clinch re-election. Republicans held both houses in Congress and started Bush’s second term in their strongest position since 1928.
Bush immediately sought to use this majority for something he had never hinted at: so-called Social Security reform. It had long been a goal of conservatives to move the government-pension programme from a uniform entitlement to one based on individual investment, and Bush began his second term trying to make this dream a reality.
His problem was that he had no mandate to do this, having never made it a key part of his platform. Congressional Republicans wanted no part of such a poorly planned scheme, and Bush abandoned it without it ever even receiving a congressional hearing.
The damage was done, though. Moderates who thought they were getting one thing got another, one they neither liked nor understood. The deteriorating situation in Iraq also contributed to the public shifting towards Democrats. The GOP lost control of both houses in a disastrous 2006 midterm election.
Barack Obama took office in 2008 with the potential to remake his party’s fortunes. Democrats rode dissatisfaction with Bush and the economic collapse to give the party its largest majorities in the House and Senate since 1978. Democrats began talking about undoing the Reagan years and returning the party to the decades-long dominance they had held before the Gipper upset their apple cart.
Obama instead led his party to a midterm disaster even worse than Clinton’s. Democrats lost 63 seats in the House, the most any party had lost since 1938. Republicans gained six Senate seats and would have picked up more but for some ultra-conservative “Tea Party” nominees who lost otherwise winnable races.
Obama “accomplished” this by making a Leftward shift more dramatic than Clinton’s. Having pledged to unite Red America and Blue America, he pushed for a cap-and-trade policy to fight climate change that would have dramatically hiked energy prices for everyone. Like Clinton, he made revamping health care his priority, pushing through the unpopular ObamaCare reform that extended government subsidy and control over the nation’s massive health sector. Democratic dreams of a new era of big government were buried in the 2010 midterm graveyard.
Joe Biden was simply the latest in this long line of losers. Americans thought they were voting for a return to normalcy after Trump’s tumultuous first term. They instead got proposals for multitrillion-dollar government spending programmes, with inflation adding salt to the wound, and a renewed progressive culture war. Trump’s continued unpopularity limited Democratic losses in the midterms, but the party still lost House control and Biden’s own re-election dreams were doomed by his unpopularity.
Trump, like his predecessors, was elected to end this ideological warfare. Control the border, get the economy moving again, protect entitlements, and end the woke war on common sense: these were the primary themes Trump campaigned on and which voters accepted. His path forward should be clear.
He certainly is moving quickly on two of these. Trump has effectively ended illegal border crossings and is moving to deport as many illegal aliens as rapidly as possible. His executive orders to remove federal funding from institutions that promote DEI and permit transgender women born as men to compete in women’s sports remain widely popular.
Yet Trump seems to be making his predecessors’ mistakes at the same time. Polls show Americans do not want to annex Greenland or make Canada the 51st state, yet Trump keeps talking about it. People are divided on imposing tariffs, but they largely oppose levying them on longtime allies and only clearly favour them when levied on imports from China. Trump nonetheless seems determined to dramatically upend 35 years of globalisation without the slightest effort to explain the rationale behind this sweeping change.
“Trump seems to be making his predecessors’ mistakes.”
Trump’s foreign policy also threatens to upend decades of policy in the face of public opinion. About 60 percent of registered voters, and about half of Trump voters, have a favourable opinion of NATO. Yet his relentless criticism of the Western Alliance has convinced most other NATO members that he would not fulfil America’s treaty obligations for mutual defence if they were attacked.
The same is true with Russia and Ukraine. Seventy-two percent of Trump voters see Russia as an enemy or as unfriendly, and only 5 percent of Trump voters sympathise with Russia in its war with Ukraine. They may want military aid to be reduced or eliminated, but they do not want the plucky country to fall under the Kremlin’s sway, much less be humiliated by Washington. Yet the administration is bent on going further than the public.
The signs also point to further shifts that excite the base and frighten the middle. Many Trump backers are urging him to defy court orders blocking some of his executive orders, but 82 percent of Americans think a president should obey court orders even if he disagrees with them. Republicans may agree with his continued deportation of migrants in defiance of a court order for him to stop, but independents disagree by a 20-plus-point margin.
Trump’s order to dismantle the Department of Education as much as practicable under law also risks public condemnation. Republicans want him to do that, but independents largely do not. Even a quarter of 2024 Trump voters do not want him to eliminate the department. His tiny margin of victory, and the GOP’s midterm hopes, would dissolve if even a small group of those people switched sides.
It’s easy to understand why Trump is doing this. His most loyal and fervent backers like all of these actions, and Trump likes to reward people who are loyal. The problem is that his majority rests on many people who are not MAGA loyalists or GOP donors.
Especially among nonwhites, that majority includes millions of people who had never voted for him before. They backed him because four years of Biden Leftist incompetence persuaded them that he could solve their problems. Focusing on these new things engenders the same “bait-and-switch” feeling that have led swing voters to become disillusioned for decades.
There’s still plenty of time for Trump to get back on track. Stop talking about annexing Greenland or Canada. Explain why tariffs will cause short-term pain but produce long-term gain so that voters are willing to ride out any downturn. Show that what you want in the world is allies who can pull their own weight, not making America isolated in a world we can no longer dominate.
Trump should especially focus on showing positive results on his key platform planks by next November. Ramping up deportations while reducing the number of people wrongfully expelled will satisfy his base and swing voters. He should also keep culture-war fights to battles that unite rather than divide Americans.
Above all, he should rally Americans around shared ideals. Next year is also the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Trump should launch a big initiative to promote it and give many speeches that explain how and why that document provides the foundation for everything he wants to accomplish. That would wrong-foot his progressive enemies, who would be unable to resist the temptation to take issue with his words and thus make “what is America’s promise” the defining question for the midterm.
Ronald Reagan was fond of quoting Thomas Paine’s famous line in his 1776 pamphlet, Common Sense: “we have it in our power to make the world over again”. That’s a utopian sentiment, but even Reagan knew that couldn’t happen all at once.
Trump can remake America, but he can’t do it by dividing his coalition and continuing a generational pattern of presidents saying one thing and doing another. Slow and steady wins the race. A little more focus and less scattershot razzle-dazzle could break the destructive pattern and cement America’s willingness to break with the past and move toward Trump’s view of American greatness.
