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Tens of millions of Americans voted for President Donald Trump in the belief that he would be competent. They might not have been thrilled that Trump is a convicted felon, or pleased with his role in the violent attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Many worried that he posed a threat to democracy. But enough were willing to overlook all that, because they convinced themselves that Trump would be an effective chief executive, that under his stewardship their lives would get better and the country would prosper.
A survey from the Democratic pollsters Douglas Schoen and Carly Cooperman, conducted shortly after the election, helps illustrate the point. By an 11-point margin, independents said they would be less confident that the Trump administration would share accurate information compared with the Biden administration. Yet, by a 10-point margin, those same voters said that they thought the Trump administration would be more effective at getting things done.
“Ultimately, our postelection poll makes clear that voters prioritized perceived effectiveness rather than upholding democracy this election,” Schoen and Cooperman wrote, “and while they are deeply skeptical towards our institutions generally, they are cautiously optimistic that the incoming administration will be effective at providing real-world solutions.”
[Read: Trump loudly insists that he’s incompetent]
A little more than half a year into Trump’s second term, however, the public’s confidence in his skill as a chief executive is shattering. In a recent AP/NORC poll, only about one-quarter of U.S. adults said that Trump’s policies have helped them. Roughly half report that Trump’s policies have “done more to hurt” them, and about two in 10 say his policies have “not made a difference” in their lives. Remarkably, Trump failed to earn majority approval on any of the issues in the poll, including the economy, immigration, and cutting government spending.
As a result, a politically toxic impression is hardening. Trump’s approval rating in the most recent Gallup poll is 37 percent, the lowest of this term and only slightly higher than his all-time low of 34 percent, at the end of his first term. (Among independents, Trump’s approval rating is down to 29 percent.) Americans already understood Trump to be corrupt, and proved themselves willing to tolerate that. But now they are coming to believe that he is inept. In American politics, that is an unforgivable sin.
On the economic front, Trump’s tariff increases—announced and then altered, often without rhyme or reason—are only now beginning to percolate through the economy, and the steepest hikes haven’t yet kicked in. The economy appears to be slowing down. Consumer prices are up 2.6 percent from a year earlier, which is keeping the Federal Reserve from cutting interest rates despite intense pressure from Trump. The jobs report for July showed a gain of only 73,000, a sign that the labor market is weakening. Perhaps more significant, the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised the jobs totals from May and June downward by more than a quarter of a million. Unemployment ticked up to 4.2 percent. Consumer spending is well below what it was last year. More than half of all Americans say the cost of groceries is a “major” source of stress in their life right now. Many industries are postponing hiring, and the national hiring rate is near its lowest level in a decade. Customers appear to be holding off on large, long-term purchases. The Budget Lab at Yale University calculates that the American consumer is dealing with an average effective tariff rate of 18.3 percent, the highest since 1934, and it estimates that price increases will cost each household $2,400 on average this year. General Motors reported last month that Trump’s tariffs have cost the company more than $1 billion. And the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, said in a statement that Trump’s latest tariffs “would disrupt essential transatlantic supply chains, to the detriment of businesses, consumers and patients on both sides of the Atlantic.”
The Trump administration is betting that the president’s tariffs will not be inflationary, will generate massive revenue flows that significantly reduce the deficit, and will lead to a renaissance in American manufacturing and investment. If it’s right, Trump will reap the political benefits. But we believe the administration to be dead wrong, and that this will become painfully obvious to ordinary Americans in the months and years ahead.
The economy isn’t the only place where Trump’s policies will hurt rather than help. Estimates predict that the number of Americans without health insurance will increase by more than 10 million in less than a decade, with particularly devastating impacts for vulnerable rural populations. Eliminating a quarter of the IRS workforce may well undermine tax collection and increase the wait time for Americans to receive refunds. Slashing the Social Security Administration, which is serving more people than ever before, with the fewest workers in half a century, will increase wait times for those needing help. It will lead to field-office closures that will hit seniors in rural communities the hardest and may well delay the processing of retirement, disability, and survivor benefits. A 70-year-old retiree in Indiana told The Guardian, “For the first time in my life, my wife and I are stressed out and worried if I will get my payment and if it will be on time.”
The Trump administration has devastated the National Institutes of Health, one of the world’s foremost medical-research centers and the biggest sponsor of biomedical research in the world. Nearly 2,500 grants have been ended or delayed, disrupting vital medical research, reducing the pool of available researchers, and compromising public health and disease prevention.
“The country is going to be mourning the loss of this enterprise for decades,” Harold Varmus, a Nobel Prize–winning cancer biologist who served as the director of the NIH from 1993 to 1999, told The New York Times. (There are signs that some Republicans in Congress are finally stirring from their slumber and might be ready to push back against what the Trump administration is trying to do, though the administration may attempt to thwart their will by ignoring appropriations or setting up a fight over impoundment or trying more rescission.)
Massive cuts to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, resulting in the loss of some of the weather service’s most experienced leaders and impeding the collection of data that are essential for accurate and timely weather forecasting, will place Americans at greater risk of experiencing extreme-weather events.
As The Atlantic’s David A. Graham has written, the Federal Emergency Management Agency is in disarray, headed by a person who is clearly out of his depth. Trump wants FEMA eliminated by the end of the year. It has already lost about a third of its permanent workforce, and its program dedicated to helping communities prepare for natural disasters such as floods and fires has been canceled. FEMA is hardly a model federal program; a slew of changes could make it better. The problem is that the Trump administration has no plan to pick up the slack in a post-FEMA world, and states and municipalities will be hard-pressed to do so.
[David A. Graham: FEMA is not prepared]
In the immediate aftermath of the recent Texas floods, FEMA’s earlier decision to lay off hundreds of call-center contractors resulted in thousands of unanswered calls for recovery assistance. (The administration dismissed reports about this as “fake news.”) FEMA didn’t deploy to St. Louis for several weeks after a tornado destroyed parts of the city, leaving people unable to apply for even basic payments for fresh food and medicine, let alone get help addressing uninsured losses from the natural disaster.
The Trump administration is also decimating anti-corruption efforts within the federal government. It announced earlier this year that the landmark 1977 Foreign Corrupt Practices Act would no longer be enforced. It also announced the termination of two Justice Department programs designed to seize and return foreign assets from kleptocrats and oligarchs close to Russian President Vladimir Putin. And it has fired or demoted 20 inspectors general and acting inspectors general, who are ferreting out waste, fraud, and abuse within the government.
As lifelong conservatives, we are completely on board when it comes to insisting on accountability in government programs; increasing their efficiency; and, in some instances, reorganizing them, downsizing them, and even eliminating them. The problem is the thoughtless and reckless way in which the Trump administration is going about this—all while passing a “big, beautiful bill” that will add a staggering $3 trillion to the national debt.
Trump has surrounded himself with nihilists, people waving around a chain saw onstage like a madman and boasting that career civil servants should be viewed “as the villains.” Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vought, said in 2023: “We want to put them in trauma.”
So Democrats have a lot to work with. On an almost-daily basis, Trump is discrediting his own leadership; that gives Democrats the opportunity to highlight, with laser-like focus, his failure to deliver on his own promises. In doing so, Democrats need to present themselves not as the party of government but rather as the party of reform, as disrupters of the status quo on behalf of the common good. We believe they must tell voters that in all sorts of ways—the economy, health and health care, disaster relief—Trump is making their lives worse, not better. He and his administration are amateurs, inept and in over their head. They are entertainers and grifters, shock jocks and freaks. Whatever talents they may possess, mastery of governing is not one of them.
Perhaps most important, the incompetence argument needs to be humanized. Democrats need compelling, empathy-evoking narratives pointing to the harm being done to ordinary people by the enormous ineptitude of Trump and his enablers. For example, Democrats could tell the story, as former NIH Director Francis Collins has done, of the woman in her early 40s, afflicted with Stage 4 colorectal cancer, who was on the path to an immunotherapy clinical trial that might have saved her life, until cuts to the NIH caused a devastating delay; or of the children afflicted with rare diseases whose lives may be affected because advances in gene editing have been stopped in their tracks; or of the families who are seeing their hopes for breakthroughs in Alzheimer’s disease potentially dashed. They could talk about the role that Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has spread anti-vaccine conspiracy theories, is playing in the worst outbreak of measles in decades. Or about his decision to cancel nearly $500 million in grants and contracts for developing mRNA vaccines, which have been responsible for saving millions of lives from COVID and were considered the most exciting new opportunity in cancer immunotherapy. They could also explain why the Trump administration isn’t prepared for a bird-flu pandemic, should one happen.
[Read: Bird flu is a national embarrassment]
Democrats could tell the story of how farmers in places such as western Iowa are struggling as tariffs increase their costs at home—for machinery, fertilizer, herbicides, and feed—while limiting their access to international markets.
Democrats could show how workforce raids by ICE agents with battering rams are in the process of destroying Glenn Valley Foods in Omaha, which had been one of the fastest-growing meatpacking companies in the Midwest. According to The New York Times, “In a matter of weeks, production had plummeted by almost 70 percent. Most of the work force was gone. Half of the maintenance crew was in the process of being deported, the director of human resources had stopped coming to work, and more than 50 employees were being held at a detention facility in rural Nebraska.”
Thanks to the reporting of Nick Kristof at The New York Times, Democrats could talk about the babies such as Gbessey, who lived in a village in Liberia and died of malaria because the Trump administration shut down USAID, which meant health workers had no malaria medicine to offer the child; and how Gbessey’s younger sibling, Osman, also became seriously ill with malaria. They could tell of children orphaned by AIDS dying in South Sudan because the community-health workers who had brought them medicine have been laid off. (A recent study in The Lancet projected that the defunding of USAID could lead to 14 million deaths by the end of the decade.)
These examples are but the beginning; Trump, after all, has more than 1,200 days left in office. There is no evidence that he’s going to get more competent or more compassionate, and plenty of evidence to the contrary. The challenge for Democrats will be to keep up with the cascading horror stories and to tell them in compelling and sensitive ways, conveying the devasting effects of the Trump administration’s across-the-board mistakes.
IN THE GREAT GATSBY, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about Tom and Daisy Buchanan, the aristocratic couple who exemplify the moral corruption of the wealthy.
“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy,” Fitzgerald wrote. “They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”
[From the March 2023 issue: A new way to read ‘Gatsby’]
Trump is smashing up things on a scale that is almost unimaginable, and he seems completely untroubled by the daily hardships and widespread suffering he is leaving behind. And the president is hardly done. The pain and the body count will rise, and rise, and rise. It will be left to others to clean up the mess he has made. Some of the damage may be repaired with time; some will be irreparable. Democrats should say so. It’s their best path to defeating his movement, which is the only way for the healing to begin.
