There’s a large market for “Trump is bad” posts. I wrote one of them back in May:
It’s easy to tune these posts out, for at least two reasons. One is partisanship — as a reader, I’m sure you know how hard it is to separate “Trump is bad” from “Trump made me mad”. The second is fatigue — you’ve heard the familiar litany of all of Trump’s outrages, and reading it one more time is both redundant and depressing.
Today I’m going to do something a little different, which is to ask: Why, exactly, has the second Trump presidency been such a failure?
Trump is a failure in the eyes of the nation
Before I do that, we should establish that in the eyes of the nation, Trump’s second presidency has been a failure, at least so far. His approval rating, going into the midterm election, is at historic lows:
America was mildly disapproving of Trump in his first term; now, only his base is staying loyal. And even that base is eroding. On the cost of living — one of the key issues in 2024, and likely to be a key issue in the midterms — Republicans now disapprove of Trump:
Hilariously, a modest but growing number of people who voted for Trump in 2024 now say they never voted for him.
And despite the widespread belief that Trump’s cult of personality dominates the GOP, Republicans now tend to say they support the party rather than the president himself:
But nevertheless, the GOP is going to suffer from Trump’s unpopularity in the midterms. Prediction markets are increasingly sure that Dems will take the House, and they now also give Dems a better-than-even chance of winning the Senate, despite a very difficult map:
Polls showing Senate races moving toward the Dems might be overstating things, but polls have ended up understating Democratic support in special elections since Trump returned to power. Trump has resorted to desperately promising $5000 checks to every U.S. citizen if Republicans win the midterms. But so far, these wild bribe attempts are falling decidedly flat — in fact, they’re actively driving voters away.
All this is all the more remarkable because Democrats themselves are in disarray. The party has torn itself apart over Israel/Palestine, and the public is still deeply skeptical of Dems’ “woke” progressive ideology. But whereas Americans still trusted Republicans more on many issues in 2025, now they tend to trust Democrats on issues like the economy and immigration:
The GOP was more popular than the Dems as of one year ago; now that has reversed.
Even some of Trump’s most prominent allies are now distancing themselves from the president. Here’s Peter Thiel, one of the godfathers of the Tech Right:
I can’t rule out the possibility that someday we’ll all look back on Trump’s second presidency as a success. Perhaps winning the AI race will prove to be so much more important than everything else that Trump’s decision to stall AI regulation ends up swamping everything else he ever does.
But I don’t find it very useful to indulge in this kind of “too early to tell” speculation. The blunt fact is that Trump’s second term has already failed in the court of public opinion. This is an incredible, world-historic failure. And it didn’t have to be that way — Trump simply made a bunch of avoidable errors, for a mix of ideological and personal reasons.
