Bad news keeps piling up for President Donald Trump. He is at 40 percent job approval. Voters disapprove of his performance on issue after issue, from the economy to immigration to Iran. His party’s majority in the Senate, which had looked safe in the midterms, no longer does.
Most of the administration’s prosecutions of Trump’s critics have been laughed out of court. It has had to retreat from its shock-and-awe tactics on immigration enforcement in liberal cities. Trump keeps trying one harebrained scheme after another to force his preferred set of changes to election laws through an unwilling Congress. Lawmakers also made him retreat from his plan to send federal money to supporters who participated in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol.
Inflation is rising. Almost nobody is defending the Iran settlement as a U.S. victory, and some are calling it a humiliation. Even an initiative as modest as the cleaning of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has become a debacle.
It’s all a big comedown from the first year of this presidential term, when Trump seemed to be bulldozing his critics: using the U.S. DOGE Service to slash the federal government, getting almost all of his Cabinet nominees confirmed, winning concessions from law schools and universities, using unilateral tariffs to restructure global commerce.
But this reversal of fortune isn’t the work of a brilliant and effective opposition. Some of it owes to a familiar sort of presidential hubris. Trump acted as though voters chose him in 2024 because they loved everything about him, rather than because they hated inflation. Since winning, he has taken a few steps that place upward pressure on prices — warring with Iran, imposing tariffs, trying to push interest rates down by intimidating the Federal Reserve — and done little to foster the impression that he cares about the public’s top concern.
In Trump’s popularity decline, we are also seeing the interaction of our constitutional system and a president who is neither interested in nor adept at working through it. A determined president can make the Justice Department issue frivolous indictments. He can’t make the courts respect them. Even if DOGE’s leaders had known more than they did about the federal budget, they would not have been able to make a dent in spending without action by Congress. It would also have taken Congress, and greater clarity about goals, to abolish the Education Department or pare back the federal role in education policy.
Trump appears to have believed that the Iranian regime was so weak that bombs would lead to its demise. When that didn’t happen, his options were limited. Even if he had wanted to apply the force it would have taken to achieve the hawks’ goals, he did not have the public and political support for it. Going to Congress for prior approval of the war, as constitutionally required, would have either built the needed support or shown that it would not materialize and spared both the country and Trump this defeat.
Trump’s term isn’t even half over, and the impression that he is flailing could prove as exaggerated as was the sense last year that his presidency was a steamroller. Precisely because he has acted on his own more than through Congress, it might not set him back much to lose majorities in the House and Senate this fall.
And some of the administration’s major policies may have staying power. Federal courts seem to lean toward the view that Trump’s measures to abolish racial discrimination against Whites and Asians are constitutionally required. That’s a consequence of the appointments Trump and previous Republican presidents made to the judiciary. And since, for the most part, Congress did not set that discrimination in motion, legislation isn’t needed to stop it either.
It’s less clear whether the changes to higher education that Trump has sought will stick. The public, especially conservatives, has been souring on the status quo. But the likelihood of durable reform would be higher if the administration had relied more on legislation covering all institutions than on one-by-one deals with college presidents.
The most enduring changes a president can make are the ones that the opposition party finds itself having to make peace with. Think of the New Deal or the Reagan revolution. The Democrats have instead been radicalizing in response to Trump, which makes the president’s achievements — notably border control — more insecure.
The results of the Trump presidency so far are disappointing some of the people who voted for it. (Hence the poll findings.) But they ought to be encouraging in one important respect: It turns out that even in our era of heightened executive power, a president can’t consistently get his way through the sheer force of his will.
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