Trump keeps reminding the American public to dislike him

President Donald Trump is now the most unpopular he has been during his second term. More than half of American adults disapprove of the job he is doing, and he’s underwater on nearly every important issue of the day. The polling averages show this net disapproval clearly: On the economy, he’s down 13 percentage points. On inflation, he’s down 20 points. Even on immigration, he’s down 2 points. (Those negative marks include foreign policy, though it’s too soon to say how the public is reacting to Trump’s decision to join Israel’s bombing of Iran.) Still, Trump’s popularity decline has been a dramatic development: After entering office with a positive approval rating and popular support for his agenda, he’s squandered much of it away through various political fights, policy decisions, and public spectacles. That reversal has come in fits and starts, yet also demonstrated a curious trend in Trump’s popularity. When Trump is at the center of the news, using his bully pulpit and making high-profile efforts to pursue his agenda, his popularity falls. When he recedes into the background, and the public is focused elsewhere, his popularity somewhat recovers. In short, the more people pay attention to Trump, the less they like him — which creates a kind of conundrum. Trump, who’s uniquely capable of capturing the limelight, has shown he’s also incapable (or unwilling) to do anything quietly. Immigration policy is the latest example of this trend. Public opinion turned sharply against Trump’s response to protests in California over raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Views of his deployment of the National Guard and a few hundred US Marines to the West Coast have similarly been resoundingly negative. And overall views of Trump’s immigration policy, as a result, have fallen to their lowest point this year, per tracking polls by YouGov. Beyond any one policy, these trends in public opinion suggest that Trump is turbocharging two features of modern presidential politics. The first is the idea of negative polarization: that members of one political party are bound together and mobilize against an opposing political party or movement more strongly than for their own side. And the second is of the electorate as operating a thermostat: preferring the opposite opinion or direction to whatever the president, or party in power, says. These shifts matter. They tell us a lot about Trump-era politics and about how modern American politics might exist after him. And they offer a clue as to how the public might react to American military involvement in the Middle East. Presidents tend to see a public boost — a rally-around-the-flag effect — when America gets involved in military conflicts. Will Trump’s popularity rebound? Or will this be yet another example of Trump being different? Does the American public actually prefer inaction? A quick scan of the last six months of Trump’s job approval shows something remarkably consistent: Almost every time Trump makes a big policy move or announcement, the public recoils in disapproval. This dynamic is most pronounced in three sharp spikes in disapproval: after Elon Musk and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency rampaged across the federal government, after the rollout of tariffs, and as Trump picked a fight in California over ICE deportations. DOGE kicked off the downward slump in his approval rating and popular support for his policies, in mid-March. As Trump reined in Musk, and DOGE faced more obstacles and public scrutiny, it began to fade from headlines, and Trump’s approval rating began to recover. Then the cycle repeated. As Trump mulled a trade war and signaled he would implement a new tariff regime in late March and early April, views on his handling of inflation, trade, and the economy began to nosedive. Disapproval of his trade and tariff approach, in particular, spiked during the late-March to mid-April period when “Liberation Day” tariffs were being announced and the stock market was roiled with instability and distrust. Since Trump ratcheted down his policy and softened his public entrenchment on tariffs, his ratings have stabilized, and even recovered a bit, according to an average of polls maintained by the pollster Adam Carlson. The same cycle would play out again when Trump turned his attention to immigration policy, historically his best issue. Views of his approach to immigration and mass deportations have been much more volatile since late March and mid-April, when high-profile arrests and detentions of foreign-born students and immigrants began to dominate the news. It was around this time that the legal showdowns over Kilmar Ábrego García’s deportation to a Salvadoran prison dominated headlines, and public opinion over Trump’s immigration approach began to turn negative. For most of the period from his inauguration to April, Trump had enjoyed positive ratings on immigration. His mass deportation pledges were still popular with most Americans. But hunkering down on those spring decisions resulted in the public turning against Trump’s position. His immigration ratings saw a dive, which only began to recover once Trump backed down and turned his priorities on Congress and his legislative agenda. Like a switch, public opinion on immigration policy began to get more positive during a time when Trump wasn’t really creating that much news around the topic, until ICE raids began to pick up steam and small protests began to erupt in Democratic cities. His aggressive response — federalizing the National Guard and sending Marines to Southern California — has again triggered a collapse in public views. According to YouGov, approval of Trump’s handling of immigration is now the lowest it’s been this year, and lower than it was at this point during his first term. It’s all a bit confusing: Trump is doing what he repeatedly promised to do during his campaign — the same campaign that won him enough popular support for a second term in the White House. The public, however, is punishing him for it. Trump isn’t the first president to deal with a reflexive public This weird seesaw of the public reacting negatively to big policy decisions Trump makes is a defining characteristic of modern politics. He isn’t the first president to deal with a reflexively reactionary public, as both Joe Biden and Barack Obama experienced this during their presidencies. Both Democratic presidents saw drops in public support once they began to implement their agendas, be it the Affordable Care Act beginning in 2009, or Biden’s legislative packages and Afghanistan withdrawal in the summer and fall of 2021. And so Trump’s two terms seem to fit this pattern, what some political scientists call the “thermostatic” model of public opinion. This basic idea — that public opinion shifts in the opposite direction of whatever direction the government takes — is a powerful predictor, but it doesn’t fully explain Trump’s second term. Just like you’d turn a thermostat’s temperature up or down depending on the feeling in a room, the public reacts positively or negatively depending on the actions taken by a president and party in power. Plenty of political research demonstrates this thermostat in action: the public supporting spending cuts when the government begins to spend more, the public growing more liberal on social issues when a conservative president seizes on it (as on immigration and racial justice during the Trump years), support for the Affordable Care Act rising when Republicans try to cut it. These anti-incumbent shifts then suggest future political advantage for the political party or movement out of power. But just because the public is cooling on Trump, that doesn’t mean it, so far, is warming to Democrats — or even to liberal policy positions. Public views of the Democratic Party are still resoundingly negative: a little more than a third of Americans have favorable views of the party or of Democrats in Congress, both lower than views of Republicans. Democrats only enjoy a slight advantage in generic polling ahead of midterms next year. And views toward immigration in general, for example, are still much more negative than they’ve been at any point since 9/11, per Gallup tracking data. The pro-immigrant shift the country saw during Trump’s first term hasn’t materialized this time. Will this trend hold? With the US now embroiled in a highly fluid, quickly evolving conflict with Iran, it’s not at all clear if this thermostatic trend is holding: There hasn’t been enough time to definitively poll those views, and it’s likely that many people are still forming their opinions. According to a weekend snap poll conducted by YouGov, more Americans disapprove of US bombings of nuclear sites than approve, but about 1 in 5 were withholding forming an opinion yet. That poll was conducted after Trump announced the military strikes but before Iran carried out its own wave of missile launches against US bases in Qatar and Iraq. And whatever kind of escalation or deescalation comes next will influence how public opinion shifts. Still, there are reasons to think the anti-Trump trend will hold. Military action against Iran was already unpopular before the US got involved. Plenty of Americans were wary of Israel’s preemptive strikes earlier this month as well. And many Republicans opposed US involvement in military conflicts in the Middle East before this weekend. Of course, many of those Republicans will likely sort themselves to align with the position of their party leader. But how long that holds is another question. Any kind of rally-around-the-flag effect that might result from this conflict also doesn’t seem likely to be durable, as of now. Presidents have tended to enjoy a small bump in approval when the US conducts highly visible military operations: It happened for both George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush during the Gulf War and 9/11, and for Obama after the killing of Osama bin Laden. But as the Democratic strategist Dan Pfeiffer has pointed out, these poll boosts have been getting smaller over time as the effect of polarization has grown. And Trump is already massively unpopular, meaning any boost he gets isn’t likely to get him a majority of the country’s support. This news story seems likely to get bigger, particularly if Trump chooses to respond to Iran’s retaliatory strike. And that will feed the key determinant of this public opinion trend: Whatever position Trump takes becomes the defining, totalizing news story of the day. For now, all other stories seem to have taken a backseat to this military conflict. And when Trump dominates the news, this trend becomes clearer. Of course, other things could happen. It will take time for the public to process these developments. And more domestic news will be coming in the months ahead, as massive tax, health insurance, and public assistance cuts included in Trump’s reconciliation bill (the “big” and “beautiful” one) have yet to become law and receive the same public scrutiny other Trump policy moves have. So there’s a lot more to come. But for now, it seems like the public thermostat is working overtime.

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Trump keeps reminding the American public to dislike him