The Trump presidency has taken on a “damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead” quality. Pushing through a vast remake of the federal government and disruption of the global trade system is clearly something President Trump has wanted for a long time and now feels he has a mandate to pursue after the November election. But his poll numbers on the economy have begun to sag and his job approval ratings are upside-down. As a pollster who assesses political performance and policy impact, I keep coming back to this: What exactly did Americans elect Mr. Trump to do?
That question reflects a central mystery of this presidency so far: Are Mr. Trump’s actions in step with what voters want from him, or is he going rogue on America, doing his own thing, polls be damned? Did people want him to remake the government and disrupt the global financial order, or did they just want cheaper groceries?
How people see and judge that will help determine his ultimate success or failure in office as well as the chances of the Republican Party securing its policy agenda in the years to come.
Mr. Trump seems to view his job differently than many voters, which is one reason for his falling poll numbers. He strongly believes that he was elected to return to Washington as a disrupter, this time with significantly more experience and effectiveness than in his first term. He sees himself as bringing strength back to the Oval Office after four years of a weak Joe Biden. In this, he believes he has the latitude to go big and bold, to create some turbulence and cause some prices to rise in the short term as he asserts himself in Washington and around the globe. All of this, Mr. Trump says, is in hopes of establishing a stronger American position over the long term.
But as I dug into Mr. Trump’s polling data, it looked increasingly that American voters’ mandate to the president was more narrow than he sees it. After a prolonged period of inflation, with a Biden administration that told Americans not to believe their lying wallets, voters clearly wanted the next president to stabilize the economy and make their cost of living more manageable.
Mr. Trump and his cabinet officials have warned Americans that we are doing things “the hard way” and that access to “cheap goods” is not a priority. In doing so, they are asking the country to absorb short-term pain for the prospect of long-term gain.
Without a clear, consistent vision for what Americans will get for their upended government or pricier groceries — and how soon they can expect to get it — the Trump team may quickly find the good will of the public running out, especially the swing voters who rewarded Mr. Trump and Republican candidates with their support in the expectation of economic progress.
Presidents have misread their mandates in the past, seeing what they want to see rather than what the voters have plainly told them. The best argument for Mr. Trump’s belief that he was elected with a broad mandate to bring about aggressive change is that he never pretended he’d do otherwise.
Election polls showed that Americans wanted a president who had the ability to lead and create big change. In my own pre-election polling, seven in 10 voters said that either “a strong and decisive leader” or someone who “can bring about needed change” was what they wanted most, while attributes like “cares about people like me” or “has the right temperament” garnered much less interest.
Voters had plenty of foreknowledge of what Mr. Trump might do in a second term, and they voted for him anyway. Significantly increasing deportation or changing the government’s approach to transgender rights may not have been tip-top priorities for all swing voters, but Mr. Trump was clear what he would do on these fronts, and it is notable that at least some of his moves in these areas remain fairly popular. Even on the economy, Mr. Trump’s actions are most likely not that surprising to voters on some level. My polling showed that over 80 percent of voters believed that he would impose new tariffs as president, far higher than many other policies that Mr. Trump has pursued.
But even if Americans knew what they were getting with things like tariffs, that still doesn’t answer whether they voted for him because of those things, or in spite of those things. Even if Republicans have been clamoring to shrink government for decades, tariffs have not long been high on their wish list. And there is increasing evidence in public opinion data that Americans are growing impatient to get the primary thing they feel they were promised: a more stable economy where the cost of living is more affordable.
Shortly after the inauguration, I asked American voters how much of a priority they thought a range of policy moves should be for Mr. Trump. The very top of the list? “Reduce the cost of living.” Also high up on the list were actions on immigration, which explains why my polling has found that Mr. Trump’s immigration job approval remains positive even as his approval in other areas has grown weaker.
In contrast, “passing additional tariffs” and “firing large numbers of federal government employees” — the stuff of the headlines of the last few weeks — fall far down the rankings. Only one in four voters thought each of those items should be “one of the top priorities.” And while the numbers look more robust among Trump voters, fewer than half of them identified mass firings or tariffs as a top priority. Instead, Trump voter priorities looked just like voter priorities overall: reduce the cost of living, deport criminal illegal immigrants, secure the southern border.
Past presidents who tackled the wrong topic at the wrong time have led their party to electoral defeat. In 2004, George W. Bush was re-elected to make America safe and succeed in the War on Terror. By instead pursuing Social Security reform as the way of spending the political capital he felt he had earned, Bush arguably set Republicans on a two-year course of downfall that would result in Nancy Pelosi becoming speaker of the House. In 2008, Barack Obama was elected to fix the economic disaster of the financial crisis; but he pursued health care reform and, though he secured the Affordable Care Act, Democrats suffered monumental defeat in the 2010 midterms.
Ultimately, just as Mr. Trump is preparing voters to accept short-term pain for the promise of long-term gain, his party may be willing to accept short-term political pain if it believes it can secure a long-lasting new global economic framework and a dismantling of the bureaucratic state. And like Democrats now believing the politics of preserving the Affordable Care Act are on their side, Republicans may feel that once the initial bite of tariffs and government disruption has passed, voters will ultimately side with their view.
But this is a dangerous gamble if Mr. Trump’s agenda is carried out almost exclusively through executive power and public opinion gives government control back to his opponents; the Affordable Care Act proved too difficult for Republicans to uproot because it was enshrined in law by Congress, while many of Mr. Trump’s actions are products of pen-and-phone alone.
Mr. Trump feels America has sent him to Washington on a mission. He has, at various points in time, branded himself both as an agent of chaos and as an antidote to it. Some of his core supporters will cheer as he takes a bull-in-a-china-shop approach to institutions, and there is some evidence that voters are willing to give him leeway on his unorthodox approaches to many of the problems they think we face — a let’s-just-do-it-and-be-legends mind-set.
But the No. 1 issue in America remains the No. 1 issue, and there are real political risks to a strategy that asks voters to grin and bear it in the checkout line today for a promise of something better tomorrow.
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