I wrote a long essay for my column this week — comparing Donald Trump’s first 100 days to Franklin Roosevelt’s — so I’m running low on takes to end the week on. But I do have two thoughts that I just wanted to get out.
The first relates to the president’s declining popularity.
We learned, at the start of the week, that Donald Trump had sunk to new lows with most Americans. According to The Times’s poll with Siena College, Trump had dropped to 42 percent approval. A CNN poll shows Trump at 41 percent and both The Associated Press and The Washington Post have Trump at 39. His much-vaunted performance with Asians, Hispanics and Black Americans is also evaporated, as they shift back toward Democrats in response to the president’s poor performance. No president, not even this president in his first term, has become as unpopular as quickly as this iteration of Donald Trump.
And it’s not as if he has the ability to shift course. He is stubbornly committed to his tariffs, almost taunting anyone who might be worried about higher prices. He is committed to his unpopular cuts to federal agencies, his unpopular attacks on the federal judiciary and his increasingly unpopular immigration policies. Given his attitudes and the likelihood of an economic downturn, Trump is more likely to crater than he is to rise with the public.
All of this was basically predictable. It was predictable that Trump would pursue a ruinous set of policies — he campaigned on them. It was predictable that he would choose people ill-equipped to run the government; he did it the last time he was president. It was obvious that he would be surrounded by permissive advisers more interested in their own narrow ideological projects than in the well-being of the American people.
It did not take a clairvoyant to see how this second term would unfold. And yet it’s clear that there are plenty of people of influence who were caught off-guard by the reckless behavior of the second Trump administration. Their initial response to Trump was to accommodate him as the legitimate president (he won a free and fair election, after all); to pare back the most strident opposition and to acknowledge those areas where he was in line with the public. Even now, in the face of everything we’ve seen, there are voices who think the right approach is a quiet one.
But to my mind, the reality of Trump’s standing — of his rapidly declining political fortunes — is evidence that the best approach was the strident opposition that marked the president’s first term. As cringe-worthy as it might have been to some observers, that posture helped undermine the administration and worked successfully to contain Trump’s worst impulses.
The good news is that there is still plenty of time to embrace a more aggressive form of resistance. In doing so, people of influence — Democratic politicians, figures of industry and prominent media institutions — would be meeting the broad public where it already is. Among the polls released last week was one conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, which found that a majority of Americans, 52 percent, believe that “President Trump is a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy.”
Can’t get any clearer than that.
My second thought, speaking of the public, is about diversity, equity and inclusion.
To read some prominent commentators is to get the impression that of all the things the administration is doing, the public is most receptive to its attacks on D.E.I. But there’s no real evidence to say this is the case. In fact, D.E.I. holds majority support among American adults, and when asked whether they approve or disapprove of the president’s attacks on diversity programs, 53 percent say they disapprove.
This might be because most Americans perceive something that these prominent commentators do not, which is that the administration’s attack on D.E.I. is less about fairness than it is recreating systems of domination and subordination. Consider this line of thought from Richard Kahlenberg of the Progressive Policy Institute, a curiously named group founded as the primary think tank of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council in 1989. According to Kahlenberg, observations that the Trump administration is not interested in fairness as such are “over the top.” To him, the president simply wants the government to “treat different racial groups the same.”
This is hard to take seriously. So far, in this apparent effort to spread racial equality, the White House has removed, without apparent cause or real justification, a number of Black Americans from senior positions in the military, removed the work of Black, women and Jewish authors from the Naval Academy (while leaving books such as “Mein Kampf”), criticized the Smithsonian, particularly its Museum of African American History, for spreading supposedly “improper ideology,” pushed the National Park Service to rewrite its history of the Underground Railroad, gutted the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, rescinded executive orders mandating desegregation in federal contracting, revoked a decades-old school desegregation order, and fired dozens of women and minorities from the boards that review science and research at the National Institutes of Health.
At the same time, the White House has elevated — to positions of great influence — a set of disastrously unprepared loyalists whose main qualifications seem to be the way they look. There is no question that Donald Trump chose Pete Hegseth — formerly a weekend Fox News host — to lead the Department of Defense because he looked straight out of “central casting.”
It takes nothing more than simple observation to conclude that the administration’s war on D.E.I. is a conscious effort to undermine recognition of Black Americans, women and other groups as well as stigmatize their presence in positions of authority. Frankly, one has to be willfully blind to the substance of the administration’s war on D.E.I. to think that it has anything to do with equal treatment.
And yet, quite a few people seem to have deliberately pulled blinders over their eyes. First, so that they can pretend that the White House isn’t possessed of neosegregationist attitudes toward people who fall outside of a distinct set of racial and gender identities, and second, so that they can ignore the extent to which the president and his allies are obsessed with race, when race can be used to dominate and subordinate others.
What I Wrote
My column this week was on Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office, the second time around, and why they are a record of failure, not success.
But as consequential as they have been, and as exhausting as they’ve felt to many Americans, these first months of Trump’s second term fall far short of what Roosevelt accomplished. Yes, Trump has wreaked havoc throughout the federal government and destroyed our relationships abroad, but his main goal — the total subordination of American democracy to his will — remains unfulfilled. You could even say it is slipping away, as he sabotages his administration with a ruinous trade war, deals with the stiff opposition of a large part of civil society and plummets in his standing with most Americans.
On my podcast with John Ganz, we discussed the 1997 political thriller “The Peacemaker.” I also joined the Pizza Pod Party podcast to discuss, well, pizza.
Now Reading
Alan Elrod on American vice, for Liberal Currents.
We have become all too willing to look away today. We accept dishonesty and rapaciousness in public life. We look away from uncomfortable facts and divert our attention with glowing screens and easy entertainment. We walk daily through a miasma of vitriol, ignorance, and petty politics. And, when a man who has shown us time and again who he is promised to make our lives a little easier, we put him back in power.
Ian Bogost and Charlie Warzel on the building of an American panopticon, for The Atlantic.
A fragile combination of decades-old laws, norms, and jungly bureaucracy has so far prevented repositories such as these from assembling into a centralized American surveillance state. But that appears to be changing. Since Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency have systematically gained access to sensitive data across the federal government, and in ways that people in several agencies have described to us as both dangerous and disturbing.
Ned Resnikoff on housing and class conflict, for The Nation.
Much of the class conflict in housing politics takes place not between Big Real Estate and local communities but within communities: Affluent homeowners, particularly when they are organized into neighborhood associations, form powerful anti-housing blocs. Political science research has found that the people most likely to speak out against housing development during public hearings tend to be older, whiter, wealthier homeowners. Their opposition to new construction helps ensure the persistence of regional housing shortages, which drives up rents and locks first-time home buyers out of the housing market.
Sean Wilentz on JD Vance’s junk history, for The New York Review of Books.
As has often been noted, Jackson never said the words to which Vance was alluding. The quotation in question — “Well: John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!” — was invented and ascribed to Jackson by the New York journalist Horace Greeley (who as a partisan Whig had despised Jackson) in the first volume of his The American Conflict, published in 1864, nearly twenty years after Jackson died. Yet even critics of Vance’s and Trump’s disregard for the rule of law have ignorantly assumed that, although the quotation is made up, the essence of Vance’s depiction of Jackson’s defiance of the Court is valid.
Hadas Thier on the federal workers who are fighting back against the Trump administration, for Hammer & Hope.
But alongside likely historic defeats, stirrings from within the ranks of government employees are providing a spark of hope. As federal unions are engaged in necessary legal battles that may take months or years to wind through the courts, a scrappy but growing Federal Unionists Network has provided a fulcrum for rank-and-file members who don’t want to wait to resist.
Photo of the Week
Last July, I went to Monticello in Virginia for its Independence Day celebration and naturalization ceremony. There were American Revolution re-enactors, and I took a few photos with my large-format press camera.
I promptly forgot about the pictures.
I recently rediscovered them, had them developed and scanned the negatives to my computer. Here is one of the keepers. If not for the stray person on the left side, I’d say it was a nice composition. As it stands, it’s just a fun photo.
Now Eating: Rosemary White Beans With Frizzled Onions and Tomato
A simple dish, easily assembled by ingredients you probably have in your pantry. Serve with good bread and enjoy as a filling lunch or easy dinner. Recipe comes from New York Times Cooking.
Ingredients
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½ cup extra-virgin olive oil
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1 large white onion, halved and thinly sliced into half moons
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Fine sea salt
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6 garlic cloves, thinly sliced
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2 teaspoons minced fresh rosemary, or ½ teaspoon dried rosemary
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¼ teaspoon red-pepper flakes, more for serving
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2 (15-ounce) cans white beans, such as cannellini or butter beans (preferably canned with salt), drained and rinsed
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1 cup chopped tomatoes, fresh or canned
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1 ½ teaspoons finely grated lemon zest
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1 cup chopped fresh parsley leaves and tender stems, more for garnish
Directions
In a large skillet, heat 2 tablespoons oil until it shimmers over medium-high heat. Add onion and cook, stirring occasionally, until well browned all over, 7 to 10 minutes. Reduce heat to medium, transfer half of the onions to a plate and season lightly with salt.
Add remaining 6 tablespoons oil, the garlic, rosemary, red-pepper flakes and a pinch of salt to the onions in the skillet. Cook until garlic is pale gold at the edges (don’t let the garlic turn brown), 2 to 5 minutes.
Add beans, chopped tomatoes, ½ cup of water and 1 teaspoon salt to skillet; stir until beans are well coated with sauce. Bring to a simmer over medium-low heat and cook until broth thickens, stirring occasionally, about 10 to 15 minutes.
Stir in lemon zest and parsley, and taste, adding more salt if needed. Garnish with reserved onions, more parsley, olive oil and red-pepper flakes, if you’d like. The beans thicken as they cool, but you can add more water to make them brothier if you like.
Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va., and Washington. @jbouie
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