GOP Grows More Unpopular, More Desperate

Feeling cornered, Republicans are willing to try anything but shift to policies Americans want.

(Photo by Saul Loeb / AFP via Getty Images)

It’s SAVE America Act month, and I can’t stop thinking about dog food.

As in, Republicans have a dog-food problem. They’re serving up food that dogs won’t eat. The obvious solution is to change the recipe, but no way. They’re desperate to win and hold power, yet that’s the last thing they’ll consider.

The SAVE America Act is the latest of many voter-suppression ploys from Donald Trump, a hot mess of a president determined to rule America at all costs and for however long he wants. He is pressuring congressional Republicans to pass the bill, which would require documentary proof of citizenship (usually a passport or official birth certificate) in order to vote. A 2024 survey found that over 21.3 million eligible voters nationwide—roughly 9 percent of the total—don’t have such documentation or easy access to it. It’s an open question which party would be hurt more if SAVE manages to become law.

All this for a cause—“election integrity”—that scored literally 0 percent in a January poll asking registered voters to name the most important problem facing the country.

What is wrong with Trump and so many in his party? Would it kill them to rethink a policy or two? Must they cut nearly $1 trillion from Medicaid, which is enormously popular across the political spectrum, to give an average tax cut of $100,000 to the top 1 percent, when nearly two-thirds of Americans say the rich should pay more? Did Trump really need to start an unprovoked war against Iran that most Americans oppose, with no GOP pushback? And why does Trump keep railing against voting by mail, which is how 48 million people cast their 2024 ballots?

Trump’s bait and switch

It’s not like Trump doesn’t understand what voters want, at least on some level. In his 2016 campaign, he presented himself as anti-intervention because he knew many Americans were exhausted by the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but he didn’t follow through. In his 2024 campaign, he said fifty-three times (according to CNN) that he’d end the war in Ukraine in twenty-four hours or even before he took office. He also said repeatedly, because he knew voters were upset about inflation, that he’d cut prices on Day One.

But he also promised tariffs, which inevitably raise prices, and mass deportations, which create labor shortages that have the same effect—and which have been conducted with such careless cruelty that new examples of injustice, pain, and tragedy emerge daily. His top economic priority has been to enrich himself and the rest of the billionaire/Epstein class, while sharply cutting resources for programs that help low-income people.

Trump’s other priority is trying to prove he’s king of a cowering world. To that end, he has used or threatened force many times, at great cost morally, strategically, financially, and in human lives. His war of choice against Iran is his most senseless and ruinous “excursion” to date. So far on his ledger: Thirteen U.S. troops have died, U.S. alliances are evaporating, and gas prices are soaring.

The political upshot is that after winning a surprising share of price-sensitive working-class white and Latino voters in 2024, and persuading at least some pundits he had wrought a miraculous realignment, Trump has now lost them. “The voters Trump gained in 2024 are now his worst defectors,” analyst G. Elliott Morris wrote last week, based on his polling (with Verasight) of over 7,000 U.S. adults from May 2025 to February 2026.

“Trump’s presidency should be viewed as an anti-worker presidency,” Morris added. “I don’t say that from a partisan perspective, but based on the numbers.” Numbers like 108,000 manufacturing jobs gone, despite Trump’s promises to “revive” manufacturing, and policies that are driving up prices instead of making life more affordable.

From GOP to MAGA

There was a time when the GOP seemed like a normal party—capable of change, and of trying to win fair and square. So much so that in late November 2012, after an election in which the party’s “performance among blacks, Latinos, and women ranged from poor to abysmal,” as I phrased it, I suggested Republican prospects would improve by supporting both immigration reform and, as a signal to black voters, federal voting standards to prevent long lines and other obstacles.

I was still on that hobbyhorse in 2013, after the Supreme Court threw out the Voting Rights Act requirement that states and jurisdictions with histories of discrimination get Justice Department “preclearance” before changing their voting laws. That advance approval is no longer needed because “our country has changed,” Chief Justice John Roberts explained for the majority.

“Republicans could demonstrate they are a welcoming party if they pushed reforms making it easier rather than harder for all Americans to vote. Immigration reform is another way to send that inclusive message,” I wrote. “The survival of the GOP ultimately may lie down those paths,” I added, “but it’s a hard argument to make when short-term gains of such magnitude are within reach.”

That last line saved me from sounding like a complete naïf. Even as many states have expanded voting since 2013, an avalanche of others have been flexing their new freedom to make voting more difficult. Texas enacted a restrictive new law the same day as the Roberts ruling. Ten years later, in 2023, “at least 29 states have passed 94 restrictive voting laws,” the Brennan Center reported. Just last year, Trump’s first back in office, state legislatures enacted at least 31 restrictive voting laws—the second-highest total since the center began tracking voting laws in 2011.

There’s no more clarifying indicator of the evolution from GOP to MAGA than the aftermath of Mitt Romney’s loss to Barack Obama in 2012. The party undertook an “autopsy” that suggested Republicans needed to communicate better with young people and to “campaign among Hispanic, black, Asian, and gay Americans and demonstrate we care about them, too.”

That sensible and seemingly innocuous nod to inclusion landed in March 2013. By June, Roberts had hobbled the Voting Rights Act and set the party on a new trajectory. Trump launched his first campaign exactly two years later with a slanderous tirade against immigrants, and ended it awash in the creepy misogyny of the Access Hollywood tape. The rest, sadly, is history.