Donald Trump stormed back into power in January insisting he had a historic “mandate” to enact his extreme agenda. That was a dubious claim from the start. But, to the extent it was ever true, his mandate has largely evaporated over the course of his first 100 days in office.
A majority of Americans regard Donald Trump as a “dangerous dictator,” according to a new survey by the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute. After 100 days in office, the president’s approval rating has tanked as he bleeds support on the two most salient issues of his successful 2024 campaign: the economy and immigration. And, according to a new NPR/PBS/Marist poll, twice as many Americans give Trump an “F” grade over an “A” for how he’s handled the first 100 days in office.
“Every single day is becoming increasingly worse,” as Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee, summarized Trump’s first hundred days. “It’s bringing a whole host of folks who weren’t necessarily with us three months ago into this chorus of resistance,” he told me.
Indeed, the unpopularity of Trump’s agenda has even seemed to rub off on those around him: Elon Musk, who has led Trump’s effort to dismantle the federal government, has said he will withdraw from his role to focus on his car company, which has seen its stock plummet amid outrage over his antidemocratic work. Republican lawmakers, meanwhile, have pulled back from public appearances in their districts, reluctant to face the angry constituents who have turned up at town halls.
None of this has significantly restrained Trump, who has swerved several times in his first hundred days, but continues to speed the United States toward his authoritarian fantasy. However, it has begun to reignite a resistance movement, and has given Democrats—demoralized by their 2024 losses—an opportunity to hit back.
We saw one such counterattack in Wisconsin, where voters elected liberal Susan Crawford to the state’s high court over her MAGA challenger. Senator Adam Schiff, who led Trump’s first impeachment and has been a frequent target of the president’s ire, suggested recently that this iteration of the resistance may prove “more durable” than that of the first Trump term: “It may end up being a more crosscutting movement of American people to reject this authoritarian lurch,” the California Democrat told me.
But the path ahead is riddled with unknowns: Trump has dismissed the opposition to his agenda the same way he has brushed off the notion that the other two branches of government can check his power. And Republicans—who control both the House and Senate—have given little indication so far they will stand in his way. As Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the former vice presidential candidate, told a crowd of concerned Ohioans at a town hall I attended earlier this month, when Republicans are “more afraid of the people” than of Trump, “things [could] start to change.” But at least right now, Republicans clearly fear their leader more: “Retaliation is real,” as Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski confessed in an appearance this month. That limits the Democrats’ power to deliver a formal institutional check on Trump. “The Republicans who used to believe in oversight and accountability now believe in overlooking and accommodating,” as Ohio Democrat Shontel Brown, a member of the House Oversight Committee, told me.
The public may be able to provide some check of its own—by making clear that he is acting outside of and beyond whatever “mandate” he thinks he earned with his 2024 victory. The backlash so far has already been responsible for some Trump backtracking, Brown said: “Hopefully, the people will be encouraged by that and not grow weary.” But of course, that’s the challenge. It’s only been a hundred days of this, and there are more than a thousand to go. “I don’t know what the next 1,300 days looks like,” Brown told me, “but if it’s anything like the last hundred, we all have a lot to be worried about.”
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