One year ago, President Donald Trump seemed like an unstoppable juggernaut, radically upending both Washington and the international order, as he aggressively bent both opponents and allies to his will.
But there are gravitational forces in politics that it appears even President Trump can’t overcome. His job approval ratings – which were above 50% a year ago – have slid steadily downward, now hovering in the low 40s. And, lately, the president has encountered notable pushback, including from Congress, amid growing GOP concerns about a midterm “blue wave.”
He has even made a few quiet, un-Trump-like retreats.
Why We Wrote This
Recent votes on tariffs and blunt public criticisms signal a GOP that’s more willing to defy President Donald Trump – and worried about this fall’s midterm elections.
On Thursday, border czar Tom Homan announced that the administration was ending its deployment of immigration agents in Minnesota, after a two-month surge that led to violent clashes with protesters and resulted in federal agents fatally shooting two U.S. citizens. The move followed a similar drawdown in Maine.
Last month, the administration also withdrew federalized National Guard troops from Chicago, Los Angeles, and Portland – a move announced with little public acknowledgment other than a social media post from the president. The withdrawal came after a series of court rulings against the deployments, which had been met with sharp resistance from those Democratic-run cities. Mr. Trump claimed the troops had been needed to combat crime and said he might send them in again should crime rates go back up.
This week, Mr. Trump’s Justice Department received a remarkable rebuke when prosecutors failed to secure a grand jury indictment of six congressional Democrats who had posted a video reminding members of the military and the intelligence community that they had a constitutional duty to defy illegal orders. And the Republican head of the National Governors Association said the bipartisan group would not attend a White House meeting because the administration was planning to exclude Democratic governors. Mr. Trump put out a response on Thursday saying that the Democrats had, in fact, been invited (with the exception of two).
In many ways, Mr. Trump is following a historical pattern. Presidents often take office amid grandiose promises and high expectations, but eventually encounter both the limits of their power and the inevitable swing of the political pendulum. Gallup polls going back to Harry S. Truman show a consistent first-year presidential slide.
Since the Civil War, the president’s party has almost always lost House seats in the midterms – including Mr. Trump’s net loss of 40 seats in the 2018 election, during his first term. Current polls suggest this November could be worse. The only real question right now, says pollster Charles Franklin of Marquette University Law School, is “how great the damage will be.”
With slim majorities in Congress, especially the House, Republicans have little margin for error. Some House Republicans already appear to be shifting their plans, with a significant number – 30 so far – opting not to run again. That does not include those who have already left Washington, such as former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a once-strong Trump ally who resigned last month after a falling-out with the president.
To be sure, Mr. Trump’s hardcore MAGA base is still with him. It is “soft supporters” – some mainstream Republicans and right-leaning independents – who have been souring on him, polling experts say. The economy and immigration have been particular weak spots for the president, with net approval on both dipping to second-term lows, according to the latest Economist/YouGov poll.
Perhaps most stinging of all, three recent polls, including some from pollsters that lean conservative – Harvard CAPS/Harris, Rasmussen, and Economist/YouGov – find voters now say that former President Joe Biden did a better job than his successor, Mr. Trump.
But Democrats shouldn’t get overconfident. The RealClearPolitics poll average shows their party’s favorability at just 36%.
Rebukes on tariffs, immigration
Notably, GOP lawmakers have begun pushing back against some of Mr. Trump’s more controversial policies, after moving in lockstep with his administration for much of last year.
On Wednesday, the House voted to rescind U.S. tariffs on Canada, with six Republicans joining almost all Democrats. The measure, a similar version of which has already passed the Senate, is largely symbolic – Mr. Trump is expected to veto it – but its passage still matters, reflecting the strongest effort yet by Congress to reassert its power on trade policy. More tariff votes are expected in the days and weeks to come.
Late last year, Congress defied initial opposition from the president to push through legislation mandating the release of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, the late financier and convicted sex offender who was at one point a Trump friend (though Mr. Trump maintains that they had a falling-out years before Mr. Epstein’s crimes became publicly known). The drip, drip, drip of information from those files, which include references to many notable figures in the Trump orbit, has kept the administration on defense.
Kent Nishimura/Reuters
There’s also been a subtle shift in tone from some Republican lawmakers. GOP members have been quicker to offer criticism of Trump policies. Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama, for example, expressed concern over an Ecuadorian boy in a bunny hat detained by U.S. immigration authorities in Minnesota.
Many Republicans strongly rebuked Mr. Trump’s post on social media last weekend of a video that included a depiction of the Obamas as apes. The Senate’s only Black Republican, Tim Scott, called it “racist,” and several GOP lawmakers called on the president to apologize. He did not apologize, but Mr. Trump eventually took down the post, which the administration blamed on a staffer.
Such moments of defiance, while more frequent, remain unusual. Many of those speaking out are either not up for reelection this fall – like Senator Britt – or are already planning to retire. For those on the ballot, displeasing the president can still invite peril. In some cases, Mr. Trump is backing, or openly considering backing, primary opponents to congressional Republicans he sees as either disloyal or weak.
“He has the Republican Party still firmly within his grasp,” says John Kenneth White, a presidential historian and emeritus professor at Catholic University. “The thing that [GOP members] fear most is an angry tweet.”
Yet with Republicans needing to hold every seat to protect their majority, Mr. Trump’s threats against vulnerable members from swing districts – such as those voting to repeal the tariffs on Canada – might carry increasingly less weight. Or come across as a form of self-sabotage.
Trump team points to a record of wins
Mr. Trump might be nearing lame-duck status – the eventual plight of every second-term U.S. president – but he and his team aren’t taking it lying down. On Tuesday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt presented reporters with a list of “wins” that, she complained, they weren’t asking about: The Dow Jones Industrial Average hitting a record high. Two major medical groups endorsing restrictions on youth gender reassignment. A federal appeals court upholding the Trump immigration detention policy. And the U.S. murder rate hitting a 125-year low.
Then, Wednesday brought a better-than-expected jobs report. Unemployment in January fell to 4.3%, down from 4.4% a month before, with 130,000 jobs created. Mr. Trump and Company shouted the numbers from the rooftops.
Whether that will make a difference with voters remains to be seen. Last month, the White House said the president would begin weekly campaign-style trips to tout his record on the economy and how he was working to bring prices down. That travel schedule already seems to have fallen off.
Even those speeches have not always gone smoothly. At a visit to a Ford plant in Michigan last month, Mr. Trump was heckled by a worker over his connection to Mr. Epstein. The president, who appeared ruffled, mouthed an expletive and told the worker, “You’re fired.” This week, news outlets reported that the worker has, in fact, kept his job.