Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments.
Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern at Slate:
This week, President Donald Trump suffered a string of defeats that exposed the real limits of his power at home and abroad. First, his Justice Department abandoned its efforts to illegally appoint Lindsey Halligan, his former personal lawyer, as U.S. attorney, yielding to a furious judicial rebuke of its dirty tactics. Then the president dropped his threat to seize Greenland through military force or ruinous tariffs in the face of stiff international resistance. At almost the same time, the Supreme Court threw cold water on his bid to fire Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve. Meanwhile, Minneapolis residents continue to protest, thwart, and document his violent assault on immigrant communities.
At NYT, Nate Cohn says Trump looked fairly strong at the start of his second term, but...
One year later, the vibe has shifted back. The results from today’s New York Times/Siena University poll would have looked fairly typical during his first term. Only 40 percent of registered voters say they approve of Mr. Trump’s performance, and the familiar patterns of American politics have returned. The second Trump coalition has unraveled.
The major demographic shifts of the last election have snapped back. In today’s poll, Mr. Trump’s approval rating by demographic group looks almost exactly as it did in Times/Siena polling in the run-up to his defeat in the 2020 presidential election. If anything, young and nonwhite voters are even likelier to disapprove of Mr. Trump than they were then, while he retains most of his support among older and white voters.
A new POLITICO poll underscores those worries: Nearly half of all Americans — 49 percent — say Trump’s mass deportation campaign is too aggressive, including 1 in 5 voters who backed the president in 2024. In a sign of growing discomfort among the president’s base, more than 1 in 3 Trump voters say that while they support the goals of his mass deportation campaign, they disapprove of the way he is implementing it.