What a difference a month makes. “Liberation Day,” Trump’s announcement of massive tariffs on pretty much every other nation in the world, may go down as the biggest own goal in American—and perhaps global—political history. Trump is now less popular than any president has been at the 100-day mark in 80 years. In a new NPR survey that asked respondents to grade Trump (like the schoolchild that he is), 45 percent—including more than half of independents—gave him an “F,” while just 23 percent gave him an “A.”
In the very best scenario—for Trump, at least— “Liberation Day” would be analogous to what the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan did to Joe Biden’s popularity. After that debacle, Biden’s popularity rapidly slid and never recovered. Americans may have wanted to leave Afghanistan, but they clearly had expectations that we would not leave the country in the Taliban’s hands and strand many Afghans who had aided the American occupation. The fallout (and the relentlessly negative media coverage) led to the impression that Biden was weak, infirm, and incapable of leading—a perception that would ultimately not only doom his presidency, but the Democrats’ hopes of holding onto the White House.
It’s more likely that everything is going to get a lot worse. Trump’s approval ratings are historically awful right now even though he has managed to delay the worst effects of his trade war. But he is still stubbornly clinging to tariffs, which inevitably will cause product shortages and rising costs in the near future—not to mention a potential recession, the odds of which are worryingly high.
His administration, meanwhile, will likely continue to be beset by smaller crises that will further drive down his approval rating. His secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, is completely out of his depth and has shared military strike plans with non-authorized personnel on a number of occasions. His secretary of health and human services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is an anti-vax nutjob who is presiding over the largest measles outbreak in decades. Funding has been cut for the Social Security Administration and the Food and Drug Administration. It’s easy to imagine a near future where communicable diseases are spreading rapidly, Social Security checks aren’t going out, and E. coli outbreaks are common—all while prices are rising and the country is in a recession.
The bad news for the growing ranks of people who see Trump as an incompetent buffoon at best and a threat to the constitutional order at worst is that we’re only 100 days in. This administration has a very, very long time left in power. It is hard to imagine how the damage Trump has done in the last three months will be undone, and it’s scary to imagine how much more destruction he can wreak in the 1,350ish days he has left in power. But Americans seem to be waking up to the fact that they have elected a ruinous madman. The only question remaining is whether he’s a sort of kamikaze president—willing to crash and burn his popularity in order to wreak maximum destruction on his enemies—or somehow can be convinced to pull this country back from the brink of total disaster.
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