(Small) Signs of Hope

The Mounting Costs of Trumpism

This semester I’m teaching a Ph.D. seminar on political institutions. We are reading the canon of the field, the old books that have big ideas, and last week’s was Bingham Powell’s Elections as Instruments of Democracy. One of his key arguments is that certain forms of democracy are better at promoting accountability because voters are more able to clearly identify the parties and politicians behind policy outcomes. When identifiability is high, voters can more easily “vote the rascals out” if things go wrong. In parliamentary systems, which often have many parties working together to form coalition governments, it becomes harder for citizens to discern who exactly is responsible for what. Ditto for presidential systems with divided government.

At this political moment, the U.S. as a system has high identifiability, basically as high as it gets. The Republicans control the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government, and there is basically nothing stopping them from implementing their policy goals, other than a few procedural tricks from the Democrats here and there. The American voter will be able to see what exactly the GOP is all about, and there will be no passing the buck if and when things go wrong.

I have been writing cynical/worried basically ever since Trump came back to power. The President’s conduct last week on the foreign policy front was particularly disgusting. But today I did want to write with a note of optimism, because capturing those fleeting moments is important.

I am optimistic because there are mounting costs to everything Trump has done in the last month. He has made a series of reckless, unpopular policy decisions. He is really bad at governing! Our hospitals and universities are no longer hiring. Costs of construction materials are increasing. Tens of thousands of people have already lost their jobs from the DOGE cuts alone, which may wind up being the biggest round of job cuts in American history. There is no sign that inflation is slowing down, and it is quite likely to be exacerbated by tariffs, which

Paul Krugman

has described as “small, ugly and stupid.” Our companies will face more difficulty exporting their products abroad, as costs continue to increase, and other countries retaliate with tariffs of their own.

There is anger in the air, to the point where Republicans are now stopping town hall meetings with their own constituents. They are scared to face the American people.

It is easy to fall into the trap of staring at public opinion data, waiting for that “Trump Approval Rating” to start falling. If you are going to do this, it’s best to look at some sort of poll aggregator, rather than an individual pollster. I find myself visiting 538 again, which does a nice job of this. Here’s their latest aggregation:

So yes, Trump still has a net positive rating, though it is eroding quickly, and much faster than it did for Biden. Whatever honeymoon period Trump enjoyed is being cut short, as it did in its first term.

The underlying reason for this is that while many Americans like Trump, they don’t actually like his policies. 538 also ran some analysis on this, where they pooled together 49 different polls conducted since January 20 and looked at attitudes by issue area. They find that other than his stance on LGBTQ issues, energy and immigration, Trump’s entire policy agenda is “mostly underwater,” especially his approach to trade, healthcare, foreign policy, and government funding— basically everything beyond the culture war that actually matters to people’s lives.

Here’s their readout of public opinion on the tariffs:

According to the polls we have collected, of the four proposals, only the tariffs on Chinese goods are popular with the American people: 50 percent support them and 41 percent oppose them, on average. By contrast, just 36 percent of people support the tax on Canadian imports, with 54 percent opposed, in the nine questions that asked about this policy. The tariff on Mexico had a net approval rating of -12 points (39 percent in favor, 51 percent opposed). The extra duty on steel and aluminium imports is 9 points underwater.

And here's their assessment on some of the economic issues:

According to an AP-NORC poll conducted shortly before Trump took office, 67 percent of adults think the U.S. government spends too little on Social Security; 61 percent say too little on Medicare; 65 percent too little on education; 62 percent too little on assistance to the poor; and 55 percent too little on Medicaid. Yet these are the programs Republicans are targeting for cutting in order to offset reduced revenues from lower taxes on corporations and richer Americans.

So if Republicans actually do embark on their stated plan to gut healthcare and social security, they are walking into a public opinion buzzsaw. I think the Democrats need to fight for these policies and regain their core focus on the working class, but I’m also sympathetic to the argument James Carville made in his recent New York Times piece, which was to just “allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight.”

Another source of hope for me is how many people understand the gravity of the moment. When I started writing about Trump as a proto autocrat, part of me felt nervous that I might be overreacting, even catastrophizing. The right actually has a word for this—“Trump Derangement Syndrome”— which is meant to capture the idea that folks on the left are unable to view Trump calmly and rationally. This is also their way of dismissing concerns about Trump’s anti-democratic behavior.

I’ve been heartened by just how many people are beginning to use the language of authoritarianism to describe Trump and his faction of the GOP. This includes some heroes of mine in my own field, like Steve Levitsky and Lucan Way, who recently published a piece in Foreign Affairs about the path to American authoritarianism. Sue Stokes, one of my mentors from graduate school, has led a petition that has been signed by over 1000 political scientists, identifying the early actions of the Trump administration as fundamentally antidemocratic.

And then there’s Adam Przeworski (shiv-vors-skee), who at 84-years-old has begun a diary on Substack documenting his reactions to what he sees as a potential authoritarian transition in this country. Adam is widely considered to be one of the greatest political scientists to have ever lived. He has been cited over 80,000 times, and much of his writing centers around themes of democracy and democratization. If he had been an economist, he would have won a Nobel Prize. And he is giving us a play by play into the workings of his wonderful mind at this pivotal moment in our history.

At the political level, I’m heartened to see some of the Democrats are treating the moment with the urgency it deserves. Senator

Chris Murphy

, who is from my hometown of Wethersfield, Connecticut, has shown particularly bright and understands the stakes. Others, like my own Senator, John Fetterman, seem to be content “carrying flowers to a knife fight” and risk being coopted or duped. I’ll be writing more on this theme next week.

That’s all for today. Thanks again for reading and for sharing with friends. Please do feel free to reach out to me on the app if you have questions, comments, feedback, or just want to connect. My hope is that one day this can be something of a community for people to talk about democracy and authoritarianism.

With thanks,

Rory