What Everyone is Getting Wrong About Trump's First Week

Trump has convinced the press, the GOP, the business community, and some Dems that he is a political force, the polls say otherwise

Donald Trump is very bad at doing the job of president, but he is quite good at playing the role of president. His nonstop barrage of executive orders and displays of power serve only to curate the image of political strength, while he lacks the strength itself.

Trump sold himself as a dominant figure on the political scene. Many bought into this narrative. Congressional Republicans will do anything he says, even confirming a weekend cable anchor with a reported drinking problem to head up the Pentagon and nodding along when Trump abrogates Congress’s power of the purse. Previous anti-Trump tech leaders like Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg are falling all over themselves to curry favor with Trump and his regulators. The legacy media, which enjoyed an anti-Trump boom during his first term, is settling frivolous lawsuits rather than risk Trump’s ire or retribution from his apparatchiks. Even some Democrats seemed cowed by Trump.

But this idea that Trump has a mandate or some massive reservoir of political capital is complete bullshit.

There is a counter-narrative based on the polling, history, and recent political dynamics, which shows that Trump is a paper tiger with low approval ratings, making the classic mistake of overplaying his hand.

I am not trying to sell you a dose of uncut copium in this dark moment. Trump is indeed the second Republican since 1988 to win the popular vote. He won all seven swing states and made substantial gains in some of the Bluest parts of the country. I don’t want to downplay the scale of our loss or the work we must do to make a comeback.

But we also can’t develop the right strategy unless it's based in political reality, not in the fiction Trump wants us to believe.

Trump’s Weak Approval Rating

Donald Trump is more popular than ever, but that’s not saying much. In his first term, Trump was (in)famously the only president since the advent of polling to never have a job approval over 50%. According to a Quinnipiac poll released yesterday, Trump started his second term with a job approval of 46/43. This is ten points higher than in Quinnipiac’s poll at the outset of his first term.