Donald Trump has called 2025 “the greatest first year” of any president, but a majority of Americans strongly disagree: In the latest CNN poll, 58 percent describe that year as a “failure.”
To hardcore MAGA loyalists, the president can do no wrong. But rabid Red Hats account for only about 35 percent of Americans. And since Trump received almost 50 percent of the popular vote, that means about 15 percent of his backers were not true believers, and they are the ones who are slipping away.
The single biggest reason Trump won a second term was economic discontent with the Biden administration, and it’s the single biggest reason so many voters are now disillusioned. In the CNN survey, 55 percent say Trump’s policies have actually made things worse and almost two-thirds say he has not done enough to reduce their cost of living. Even among Republicans, reports the AP, only 16 percent say Trump has helped “a lot” in making things more affordable.
That’s an old story. Two new developments are also eroding Trump’s support, and the first is immigration — traditionally one of his strongest issues. Since he first entered politics, Trump has made fear of foreigners a major rallying cry — “Build the wall!” “Send them home!” — and in the last campaign, his ads were filled with scary images of unknown, undocumented migrants swarming across the southern border.
They were “others”: easy to demonize and dehumanize. They had no voice and no identity, and Trump and his media managers could control what voters knew and felt about them.
Once in office, Trump doubled down, promoting and publicizing ICE raids around the country, sure they could help him politically. “It was a show, a theatrical operation,” writes columnist Kate Andrews in the Washington Post, “almost certainly designed to attract as much attention as possible.”
But Trump miscalculated, and his show backfired. The ICE agents were not patrolling the border anymore, but the streets of American cities. In their military gear, wearing masks and brandishing weapons, they looked menacing, not reassuring. Their targets were not faceless hordes but real people with jobs and families, friends and neighbors.
“We’ve seen a slow dripping downward of confidence in ICE [and] the person running it, and then Minneapolis happens,” said Tim Malloy, a polling analyst with the Quinnipiac.
What happened was the shooting, on a residential Minneapolis street, of Renee Nicole Good, a white 37-year-old mother of three. Just seconds before her death, cellphone videos captured her smiling at an ICE agent approaching her car and saying, “I’m not mad at you.”
The administration tried to brand her as a domestic terrorist who had caused her own demise by driving at the agent. But the videos — seen by more than 80 percent of Americans — told a different story.
Good simply did not look like a terrorist. Plus, independent news organizations analyzed the cellphone footage and concluded that it “contradicted” the official line. Even Joe Rogan, the popular conservative podcaster who endorsed Trump, denounced ICE’s “Gestapo” tactics and said, “It’s very ugly to watch someone shoot a U.S. citizen, especially a woman, in the face.”
Trump had lost control of the narrative, and public opinion turned against him. In a CBS poll, 61 percent called ICE’s actions “too tough.” Regarding immigration roundups, 52 percent said they made them feel “less safe,” while only 31 percent felt “more safe.” To 54 percent, Good’s shooting was “not justified,” while 28 percent approved.
Trump has made a second, larger miscalculation as well. He barely mentions affordability, discounting it as a “hoax” while kidnapping the Venezuelan president, lusting after the Nobel Peace Prize and demolishing the White House. He seems far more interested in Greenland — about 1,800 miles north of Maine — than Greenville, North Carolina, or Greenville, Texas, or any of the other 30 or so Greenvilles scattered around the country.
As a result, reports CNN, just 36% — the loyal MAGA base — now say he has the right priorities, down from 45 percent a year ago. Only one-third of Americans agree that Trump “cares about people like them,” which is “the worst rating of his political career.”
Things could change before the midterm elections. The economy could improve and the mood could brighten. Democrats could blow their current advantage on immigration and resurrect some form of “defund the police,” one of the most disastrous political slogans ever. But if so many Americans still think of Trump as a “failure” next November, they will take it out on his party.
Steven Roberts teaches politics and journalism at George Washington University. He can be contacted by email at [email protected].
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