Americans Are Turning Hard Against Trumpism
His insane overreaches are giving Americans a new appreciation for free trade, immigration, and international alliances.
THIRTY YEARS AGO, THE POLITICAL SCIENTIST Christopher Wlezien proposed the “thermostatic” theory of politics. In short: If policy goes too far in one direction, voters will send signals to push it in the opposite direction, over time maintaining a rough equilibrium. This effect shows up in public opinion polls on a variety of topics, from immigration to economics to foreign policy. Although Donald Trump has demonstrated that he’s uniquely capable of breaking democratic norms, he may finally have swung the pendulum too far on all of these issues. There are indications that, in thermostatic fashion, Americans are responding to Trump’s attacks on every value, institution, and tradition of American politics by regaining their appreciation for why and how our system works.
Trump’s dismal approval rating suggests that Americans were expecting more from his second term. Voters returned him to the Oval Office because he promised to make their lives more affordable, but he did the opposite by erecting the highest trade barriers the United States has had in a century. An April survey found that 89 percent of Americans expected this policy to raise prices. The latest AP-NORC poll found that just 31 percent of Americans approve of how Trump is handling the economy—the lowest approval of any point in his first or second term.
Plummeting economic numbers should be a political emergency for Trump, as the economy was by far the issue that mattered most to voters in 2024. Inflation has been rising since April—when Trump announced his “liberation day” tariffs—while the labor market is cooling and unemployment is rising. Although tariffs have generally come down since the eye-watering levels announced on liberation day, the average effective tariff rate is 18 percent—the highest since 1934. Farmers have been hit so hard by the tariffs that Trump was forced to give them a $12 billion bailout. Trump says he’ll pay for the bailout with revenue raised by the tariffs—but the bailout is only necessary because China retaliated against the tariffs by refusing to buy American agricultural products. Trump had to give farmers a $20 billion bailout for the same reason during his first term. This is classic Trumponomics: create a problem, announce a partial fix that leaves everyone worse off than where they started, and declare victory.
It’s an article of faith in the MAGAverse that Americans are hostile to free trade, but this simply isn’t true. The popularity of Trump’s economic nationalism has collapsed. According to a recent Politico poll, just 22 percent of Trump voters say tariffs are helping the economy. After months of chaotic and destructive economic conflict with China, a majority of Americans even believe the United States should focus on “friendly cooperation and engagement with China.” Americans weren’t big fans of Trump’s approach to China during his first term, either—just 31 percent thought the trade war with China in 2018 was good for the U.S. economy.
Trump claims that he’s the first president to stand up to China, but his policies have put the United States in a weaker strategic position. He has waged economic war on America’s closest allies in Asia—in July, he slapped 25 percent tariffs on Japan and South Korea. In April, he blindsided Vietnam—as well as the American companies that shifted production there to avoid the massive levies on China—with a devastating 46 percent tariff. While these numbers have since come down, they’re still at the highest levels in decades. At a time when the United States is trying to diversify its supply chains and counter Chinese economic domination in the region, Trump has systematically degraded every trading relationship necessary to do so.
In 2017, Trump pulled the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)—a free trade agreement that covered 40 percent of the global economy. TPP would have drastically reduced tariffs among member states, including Japan and Vietnam. Trump said TPP was unnecessary because he would negotiate better deals bilaterally, but he clearly failed to do so—otherwise, he wouldn’t be imposing massive “reciprocal” tariffs on the United States’ trading partners today. TPP still exists as the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), and China has asked to join—which means an agreement that would have countered Chinese regional economic power may end up increasing it.
In 2024, 61 percent of Americans viewed trade as an opportunity for economic growth—a proportion that jumped to 81 percent in 2025, a multi-decade high. Even more remarkably, the proportion of Republicans expressing support for trade surged from 43 percent to 78 percent. During the 2024 election, Americans didn’t imagine that Trump would actually try to drag the country back to early twentieth century protectionism, but they should have taken him seriously and literally. Instead of the manufacturing renaissance Americans were promised, the economy is shedding manufacturing jobs. Instead of a golden age, Americans are getting farm bailouts and anemic economic growth numbers that are puffed up by AI speculation. Instead of falling prices, inflation has remained stubborn while Trump dismisses concerns about affordability as a “hoax” and suggests buying fewer pencils and dolls.
Trump can throw all the fits he wants about his economic numbers. He can fire the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and rage at Americans for failing to thank him for his poor economic stewardship. But in the end, the economy is what it is, and Trump can’t hide from it.
JUST AS AMERICANS HAVE DISCOVERED that they’re not big fans of pointless trade wars, they’re also realizing what the “largest deportation operation in American history” looks like in the real world. Masked agents are throwing people—including American citizens—in unmarked cars and taking them to undisclosed locations. The Trump administration assures Americans it is targeting the “worst of the worst” for deportation, but the majority of immigrants that have been arrested in recent crackdowns in cities like L.A. and Washington, D.C. have no criminal background. The administration has sent people to a Salvadoran torture prison in contravention of specific judicial orders against doing so.
Americans voted for a secure border and a law-bound immigration system. They didn’t vote for invasions of cities against the wishes of local officials; an ICE budget the size of a major military; a growing network of deportation camps with jaunty names like “Alligator Alcatraz”; creepy ASMR videos of deportees in chains and AI cartoons of crying migrants; and other forms of theatrical cruelty. Immigration was a major issue in the 2024 campaign because it’s a serious problem that remained unresolved for far too long. But the Trump administration has severely misinterpreted its mandate—most American voters wanted fewer border crossings, not a war on refugees, asylum seekers, and legal immigration.
There have been many tragic stories over the past year. A father of three U.S. Marines was brutally manhandled by federal immigration agents, and he now faces deportation. Afghans who assisted U.S. soldiers during the war had their Temporary Protected Status revoked in May, and after the tragic shooting of two members of the Virginia National Guard in Washington, all immigration requests from Afghanistan are on hold. As the Trump administration metes out vicious collective punishment on Afghans and many others who have gone through the proper legal channels to become Americans, it is also welcoming a select few groups of migrants into the country. While the refugee admissions cap has been slashed from 120,000 to 7,500, the remaining “admissions numbers shall primarily be allocated among Afrikaners from South Africa,” according to a federal notice. The administration is also giving priority to Europeans who face no threat—but happen to be ideologically aligned with the administration.
After the Washington, D.C. shooting, Trump declared that he would “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries.” He promised to “remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States” and “denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility.” He continued: “Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation.” After Trump issued the order, people from Haiti, Venezuela, and 19 other “countries of concern” had their naturalization ceremonies cancelled. Immigrants in Massachusetts were actually pulled out of line on the day of their ceremony and told that it wouldn’t take place for them. There’s nothing more American than a naturalization ceremony, in which immigrants are handed little American flags and gather with their friends and family to celebrate their official status as new Americans. There’s no clearer example of how thoroughly un-American the Trump administration’s assault on immigrants has been than this ugly betrayal of people who’ve been through a years-long legal process to become citizens.
Amid all this horror and heartbreak, there are signs of hope. It turns out that Americans don’t like seeing immigrants abused and insulted, nor do they like the authoritarian immigration crackdowns in their communities. According to Gallup, 55 percent of Americans thought immigration should be decreased in 2024—a proportion that has fallen to 30 percent. Meanwhile, the proportion of Americans who say immigration is a good thing for the country has surged to a record high of 79 percent. Gallup also found that Trump’s overall approval rating on immigration is 37 percent—just slightly above his dismal rating for the economy.
“We’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.” This is what the president of the United States said about Somali Americans last week while the vice president slammed his fist on the table in rapturous approval. The audience for grotesque displays of bigotry like this is shrinking. Trump is discovering that performative cruelty has a shelf life in the United States—it isn’t just repulsive, it’s curdling. But because he has surrounded himself with sycophants who praise him North Korea–style for saving hundreds of millions of lives and rescuing the country from certain death, he has no feedback mechanisms to warn him that he’s losing support at a rapid pace. This is a tremendous political opportunity.
AFTER TRUMP WON IN 2024, he declared that American voters had given him an “unprecedented and powerful mandate.” While Trump was the first Republican president to win the popular vote since 2004 and there were significant geographic and demographic shifts in his direction, his mandate was anything but “unprecedented.” He won the popular vote 49.91 percent to 48.43 percent, a narrower margin than Biden in 2020, Obama in 2008 and 2012, and Bush in 2004. He is now drastically overinterpreting that thin margin of victory as a mandate to wage war on the foundations of America’s postwar power and wealth—and more importantly, its identity as an open, pluralistic democracy.
One of the most cherished MAGA dogmas is the insistence that core elements of the liberal international order like free trade have been disastrous for the country. The Trump administration’s recently published National Security Strategy declares that “American foreign policy elites” made catastrophic mistakes at the end of the Cold War, such as placing “hugely misguided and destructive bets on globalism and so-called ‘free trade’ that hollowed out the very middle class and industrial base on which American economic and military preeminence depend.” While there are costs associated with free trade, this narrative has always been nonsense—trade is a major engine of economic growth for the United States, and it has coincided with the longest period of American prosperity in history.
One of the United States’ great historic advantages is its unique ability to assimilate newcomers and attract talented, hardworking people from around the world. Almost half of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants and their children, while immigrants in general are 80 percent more likely to start a company than native-born Americans. Despite Trump’s demagoguery, immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than citizens born in the country. Trump has recently discovered a fondness for President William McKinley due to his enactment of high tariffs and an “expansion of territorial gains for the Nation.” McKinley was president during the second of three major waves of immigration in the United States, this one lasting from around 1890 to 1919. During the Gilded Age Trump is so fond of, America’s foreign-born population was roughly 14 percent of the total—near a record high, and something to remember next time he fantasizes about a mythical homogeneous past that never existed.
The greatest source of American strength is its network of allies and trading partners, which has been carefully built and sustained over the past 80 years. Trump’s contempt for free trade and immigration is of a piece with his hostility toward the liberal international order. Just as he treats citizenship as an endless zero sum war between native and foreign-born Americans, he believes the United States’ relationships with its allies and trading partners are struggles for domination. He says adversaries like Russia should “do whatever the hell they want” with NATO allies that don’t spend what he regards as enough on defense. He claims that the United States is “no different than an insurance company,” which can drop its customers or raise its premiums at a moment’s notice. He believes America’s closest friends only want to “screw” and undermine the United States. He has even considered pulling the United States out of NATO.
Yet again, Americans aren’t buying it. Over three-quarters of Americans say NATO should be maintained, while just 31 percent approve of Trump’s handling of the war in Ukraine. Trump repeatedly promised to end the war in 24 hours, and his efforts to do so have been a humiliating failure. Over and over again, he has made proposals that would sacrifice core elements of Ukrainian sovereignty, surrender huge tracts of land to Putin, and lay the foundation for a renewed conflict in the near future. Over and over again, he has been rebuffed. Nearly two-thirds of Americans support sending Ukraine weapons—up 9 points from last year. Trump has been on a world tour campaigning for a Nobel Peace Prize while the most important conflict of his presidency drags on. It’s no wonder that 76 percent of Americans say he doesn’t deserve the prize, which is just about everyone outside of the most rabid elements in the MAGA base.
The Trump era has forced Americans to reconsider and reaffirm first principles: Why is the peaceful transfer of power important? What is the purpose of judicial independence? Why is corruption corrosive to democratic governance? The same applies to the public understanding of the liberal international order: Why is free trade important? How do immigrants contribute to the country? Why does NATO matter? Trump’s failures are rapidly piling up. The bill is already coming due on the tariffs, from farm bailouts to sticky inflation. Americans are quickly turning against the mass deportation campaign. It has become increasingly clear what unrestrained Trumpism means for the country: corruption and cruelty at home, incompetence and anarchy abroad. Trump likes to present himself as the reckoning for decades of elite failures, but he’s in for a reckoning of his own.
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