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This is hardly a breaking-news situation. It’s not like some horrible new information has been unearthed in the last few days about the President of the United States.
(Though I don’t think he helped himself by posting the Obamas-as-apes image and refusing to apologize.)
I started thinking about this after some comments by Ross Douthat, the moderately conservative New York Times columnist, who is, shall we say, a frequent critic of Donald Trump.
“I want to tell you a secret,” Douthat says in the video. Well, that sounds exciting.
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Center-right New York Times columnist Ross Douthat posits that President Donald Trump has “lost the country.” (Al Drago/Getty Images)
“One that most conservatives on the internet don’t want you to know. A year into his second presidency, Donald Trump has lost the country.”
Is that true?
He’s not just saying that the Democrats are going to crush the GOP in the midterms the same way that the Seattle Seahawks annihilated the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl.
He plays clips of pundits analyzing the latest polls, such as Trump with an approval rating of 37%, and a majority of Americans saying the country is worse off than a year ago.
But is this the rarefied view of the Acela corridor intelligentsia that doesn’t reflect the Silent Majority, a term popularized by Richard Nixon that Trump has now embraced?
Let Douthat make his case: “And all of this was predictable. From the first days of DOGE through the debacle in Minneapolis, the Trump administration has consistently governed as if swing voters aren’t part of its coalition. And now, guess what? They’re not.”
Let me toss out some caveats:
Donald Trump has been declared politically dead with stunning regularity over the last decade. After his “Access Hollywood” comments about having his way with women. After the payment of hush money to Stormy Daniels. And even by most fellow Republicans after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
Not to mention by the four indictments, with one conviction, that undoubtedly wound up helping Trump because they were viewed as overkill.
How many political geniuses thought at the time that Trump could come back to win a second term?
Few in political intelligentsia were truly prepared for a Trump comeback. (Saul Loeb/Pool via REUTERS)
And while I agree that the Democrats have hurricane-force winds at their backs for the midterms, it is still nine months away with many unknown variables, especially the state of the economy in the wake of Trump’s tariffs.
What’s more, Trump’s divisive governing style has always focused on playing to his MAGA base, while doggedly denouncing Democratic leaders (Tim Walz is “seriously r——d”), their cities (Baltimore is a “hellhole”), and saying Somalis are “garbage” and should be sent home.
“But here’s the thing,” says Douthat. “It isn’t moderates and swing voters who lose out when the Trump administration becomes unpopular. It’s people on the right. People like me, and certainly people further to my right who support many of the things the Trump administration has tried to do, from securing the border to pressuring American institutions to become more ideologically diverse, to resetting and rolling back DEI. All of that, all of that agenda will just disappear if the Republican Party can’t win elections.”
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Having offered up various explanations, I have to say I think Ross Douthat is onto something.
We’ve been through a stretch in which the president has kidnapped the leader of Venezuela (though Nicolás Maduro is a crooked thug), threatened to take over Greenland, alienated Canada with his 51st-state talk, abolished the East Wing, ordered his name chiseled onto the Kennedy Center, and presided over a 43-day government shutdown, the longest in American history.
And he remains dogged by the Jeffrey Epstein files, though I’d argue that the documents confirm he didn’t personally engage in sexual misconduct.
Trump has also made no effort to hide his campaign of retribution against political enemies, although such attempts have often been rebuffed by the courts (such as a judge throwing out charges against Jim Comey and Letitia James).
The Jeffrey Epstein files are a lingering albatross for the president. (Davidoff Studios/Getty Images)
I think it’s something even more visceral than that.
The awful excesses of ICE have fueled a fierce backlash against the federal forces that are carrying out Trump’s signature campaign issue, a program of mass deportation. And the violence directed at these agents is of course reprehensible.
Yet every couple of days, Americans are hearing about, or viewing phone videos of, ICE detaining a 5-year-old boy, ICE dragging a man in his underwear into the snow before returning him, ICE pulling American citizens from their cars, ICE breaking a car window after being told a month-old baby was in the back, covering the infant with shards of glass.
DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin told me in a video podcast interview that she stands by her comments that Renee Good was a domestic terrorist.
But it’s the killing of Good, who had just dropped her child at school, and especially Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse working with veterans, that have really shaken the country and made Minneapolis resemble a warzone.
The president has toned down his rhetoric, saying ICE should have used a “softer touch,” expressing sympathy for the dead Americans, and beginning a partial pullback from Minnesota.
Sometimes an accumulation of issues reaches a tipping point, one that grabs people by the throat and won’t let go, inflicting lasting damage.
The killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti have turned Minneapolis into an effective warzone. (Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
So has Trump lost the country? It’s complicated.
The tipping-point issue easily becomes shorthand for all the other attributes that people dislike about a politician. The economy really isn’t that bad, with 4.4% unemployment, but many Americans perceive their situation to be worse.
ICE’s sometimes brutal tactics, which are supposed to be aimed at illegal immigrants and the so-called “worst of the worst,” are increasingly being used against American citizens.
Less than 14% of the nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested by ICE in the past year had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses, says an internal Homeland Security document obtained by CBS.
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And then there are the children caught up in this web. According to a lawsuit, 18-month-old Amelia was rushed to a hospital with life-threatening respiratory failure, then sent back to a Texas detention center, where she was allegedly denied the daily medication doctors prescribed. As the toddler struggled to breathe, “she was on the brink of dying,” said an immigrants’ advocate at Columbia Law School, according to NBC. (Amelia was released after the suit was filed.)
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I would never rule out Trump’s ability to bounce back. But the angst over ICE, and the assault on citizens of this country, have left an indelible scar on his presidency.