Leaning hard into lawless rule, Donald Trump leaves legitimacy behind
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This piece was previously published at The Hot Screen.
President Trump has been too often treated in media coverage as a rambunctious president rather than as an aspiring strongman. In doing so, reporters and commentators have refused to connect the many dots that point to Trump and MAGA’s authoritarian objectives, choosing instead to discuss his power grabs and episodes of lawlessness in isolation from each other. There has been a tendency to cover his autocratic actions as strong or norm-pushing, rather than as what they really are: systematic efforts to destroy the checks and balances of U.S. democracy, to gather dictatorial powers, and to deprive the American people of their sovereignty and the political opposition of future electoral prospects. The result has been to deny the U.S. citizenry perspective on their country’s deep peril.
One major justification for such blinkered coverage is the notion that the president, no matter how anti-democratic or unconstitutional his actions, is simply acting in accordance with a supposedly decisive popular will revealed via the 2024 election. By this MAGA-propagated logic that was tacitly endorsed by many in the press, Trump’s victory accorded him special privileges to re-make American government in his own image. And in a perverse twist, Trump’s very real authoritarianism as president then created an incentive for reporters to justify, excuse, or ignore it by finding ways to reinforce the idea of his democratic legitimacy. After all, if Trump won a huge mandate and is simply reflecting the will of the people in his actions, then it’s easier to avoid grappling with the obvious contradictions between his lawlessness and his constitutionally-mandated responsibility to uphold the law, or between his claims to be acting on behalf of the people and the way that his policies tend to hurt, not help, the majority. And so we have had a lot of lazy stenography not only around what a huge victory he won last year (echoing Trump’s own false claims), but various accounts of a long-term electoral realignment, particularly based on Trump exceeding expectations with young and minority voters.
While his gains were real in the election itself, his victory was quite narrow, and the idea that it signified a longer-term shift was always speculative — yet this speculation was pursued by many in the media without obvious caveats, at least in part to avoid the blatant contradictions inherent in Trump’s supposed realignment of American politics. Were African-American men really set to continue backing an openly white supremacist president? Were young women really going to maintain their support for the man more responsible than anyone else in America for severely curtailing reproductive freedom? Were Latinos really going to keep showing support for a demagogue whose anti-immigrant message was inseparable from a MAGA belief that non-whites can’t be true American citizens?
Six months and change into his second term, Trump’s plunging poll numbers on a broad variety of issues have plunged a dagger into the bogus balloon not only of his supposed mandate, but also of using his relative popularity to ignore the clear authoritarian picture that has come into view. On a recent episode of The Daily Blast podcast, host Greg Sargent and New Republic writer Alex Shephard dug into the latest public opinion polls, and the numbers they discussed are startling. Trump’s support among voters under 30 is now 28%, whereas more than half of that demographic approved of him around the time of his inauguration; only 29% of independent voters approve of the job he’s doing; and though 48% of Latino voters cast ballots for him, now two-thirds of that voting bloc disapprove of his performance. As Shephard put it, “one of the things that really jumped out to me in recent polling is this idea that the emerging MAGA majority that Trump had really pushed after winning reelection [is] completely gone now.”
Trump’s current lack of mass support, combined with the discrediting of the theory of a foregone MAGA electoral realignment, shows that a basic conceit of news coverage — that his authoritarianism need not be described for what it is because Trump has been acting on behalf a permanent new majority — has been blown to smithereens (in addition to having been a fundamental betrayal of the public interest from the get-go). What was true on Inauguration Day is still truer today: no matter how many people voted for Trump, a primary responsibility of a free press is to highlight the actions of politicians who act to subvert and overturn a democratic America. And so Trump’s declining poll numbers are a real crisis for a news media that has spent the last six months largely treating him as a normal president, rather than as an existential threat to our government and free society; their bedrock excuse for excusing him has been shattered.
But Trump’s crashing poll numbers are even more of a crisis for the president himself. After all, Trump and the GOP have relied on perceptions of public support as cover for a radical, anti-democratic agenda that combines reactionary social and economic policy with presidential power grabs meant to free MAGA from democratic accountability. On key issues, the revelation that Trump is acting without the support of most Americans casts his policies in a harsher light than ever. As Shephard and Sargent touch on, and as I delved into a few weeks ago, support for Trump on a broad range of issues that fit under the general umbrella of immigration has declined precipitously — all the more striking as this has long been an area of key strength for the president. It seems nearly certain that the actual implementation of his extremist policies — such as brutally rounding up law-abiding undocumented workers and sending innocent men to an El Salvadorian torture prison — has been central to declining public support.
Given that Trump seems committed to massively escalating his most divisive policies — the deportations, the imprisonments, the sadistic arrests — it seems quite possible that public opposition will only continue to build. Among other things, it will become increasingly apparent that Trump’s authoritarian tendencies around immigration aren’t just in opposition to what most of the public wants, but constitute a conscious rejection of popular opinion. The haphazard inclusion of Americans in ICE arrests, the clear betrayal of a general understanding that ICE would prioritize criminals for removal, and the eager use of the U.S. military in immigration enforcement convey an immigration obsession that threatens to harm, not protect, Americans.
A similar dynamic of declining public support tied to increasing awareness of Trump’s unpopular policies seems to be playing out in the economic arena, where the president has long had a solid (if unmerited) reputation for business savvy. As others have pointed out, Trump has managed to amplify Americans’ concerns about inflation and the economy via his deeply erratic tariff regime, which to all but the MAGA faithful has the silver lining of being as crazy as it looks to the casual observer: an ironic twist for the president, as his victory last November was almost surely sealed by widespread public concern over inflation and perceptions of economic malaise during the Biden years. And as with immigration, Trump appears set on continuing his counter-productive policies. This continuity may truly backfire in the coming months, as the economy begins to suffer the inflationary effects of his tariff regime and the uncertainty he has introduced begins to drag on economic growth.
Add in Trump’s likely authoritarian
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