I want to tell you a secret. 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. “The majority of voters believe the country is worse off today than it was a year ago.” “Approval rating at 37 percent, the lowest of his second term.” “A failure. Fail, fail, fail.” And the grand coalition that he united to defeat Kamala Harris has evaporated. 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. “Republicans faced a major loss over the weekend, when Democrats were able to flip a reliably red State Senate seat.” “That’s an over 30-point shift to the left. You ignore this, you’re going to ice yourself out of a majority come the midterm.” But here’s the thing. 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 D.E.I. All of that, all of that agenda will just disappear if the Republican Party can’t win elections. And it will disappear especially rapidly because it’s an agenda that has been pushed primarily through executive power, without congressional buy-in and support. In the long run, you just can’t have a transformative agenda, large or small, if you don’t keep moderates and the general public on your side. Now, that may sound like an obvious point, but in fact, both left and right treat it like a grand secret or a reality that they’re interested in denying or suppressing. Throughout the Biden era, I had to listen to liberals tell me that actually Joe Biden was a popular president, very successful, maybe misunderstood only because of right-wing disinformation efforts. “He is vigorous. He is mentally acute.” “And I’m telling you, this guy is tough. He’s smart, he’s on his game.” “And over the last four years, he’s been showing up for the American people.” When the reality was that Biden had governed to the left of the country, things had gone badly and his coalition had cracked up. Simple as that. Now the same thing is happening on the right. If you listen to the influencers who sit at the heart of right-wing politics right now, they’ll either tell you that Trump is a great success —— “I don’t think anyone understands optics better than the president of the United States. I think that he is legitimately the best in the business.” —— or they’ll say the only problem is that Trump hasn’t been aggressive and revolutionary enough. “They need to escalate the fight against illegal migrants in a strategic and sensible way. We need them to get out of the country.” There’s no one to point out the bleeding obvious: that the Trump administration is failing because it is making many millions of normal Americans feel totally freaked out. “I regret voting for Donald Trump.” “So I work on my family’s farm, and we’ve lost our best hands because of Trump’s deportations.” And the conservatives who are willing to say that are the kind of people who are easy for parts of the right to dismiss. New York Times conservatives. Trump skeptics rather than true believers. But damn it, I’m right. I was right when I warned liberals in the Biden era that they were losing the country and enabling Donald Trump’s return. And I’m right when I tell conservatives and populists the truth that they don’t hear enough of on right-wing media: that unless the administration finds a way to seem a little bit more moderate and just a little bit more normal, there isn’t going to be any Trump legacy at all.
