It took Donald Trump a little more than two months to completely squander any kind of postelection goodwill he had. His approval rating has steadily dipped from 47% to 45% to 43%, according to Gallup, as the American people have gotten to actually see what Trump and his team of billionaires had in store for them. That includes diving right into the Project 2025 playbook, the same right-wing blueprint Trump tried distancing himself from on the campaign trail.
So far Trump’s priorities have included bizarrely renaming the Gulf of Mexico, threatening Greenland, menacing Canada and Mexico with his market-crushing obsession with tariffs, and musing about running for a third term. (Speaking of randomly renaming things: Happy “Liberation Day”!) Meanwhile, Trump has let unelected billionaire Elon Musk run wild through federal agencies, with government cuts threatening even cancer and Alzheimer’s research. Musk has seen his own favorability drop 10 points from February to March, according to a new Harvard-HarrisX poll, as Tesla protests play out across the country.
Let’s be clear: Trump’s mandate was never as “unprecedented and powerful” as he made it out to be. But he did come into office basically as popular as he’d ever been and with the ability to point to having won the popular vote, something he hadn’t done in two previous presidential runs. And yet Americans are already signaling their disapproval of his handling of just about everything; only 38% of US adults approve of how he’s dealt with trade negotiations, along with 40% on the economy and 41% on the issues of the Russia-Ukraine war and Social Security, according to an Associated Press–NORC Center poll released this week. Trump’s best-polling issue remains immigration, which is only at 49%.
And amid Trump’s steady erosion of support more broadly came the type of chaotic event that made us feel like we’d been transported back to 2017. The Signalgate scandal, as it’s been dubbed, looks like a clear-cut screwup: National Security Adviser Mike Waltz created a Signal group to discuss secret Yemen attack plans and included 17 government officials, such as Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth—oh, and there was Atlantic editor in chief Jeffrey Goldberg. And yet excuses for this major security lapse have involved bashing Goldberg, and have included everything from the pedantic “Nobody was texting war plans, and that’s all I have to say about that” to the suggestion on Fox News that Goldberg somehow “got on somebody’s contact” and then was “sucked into this group.”
While Trump could have picked a fall guy for the scandal, like Waltz, he opted not to. That doesn’t mean Trump didn’t consider it, though, having reportedly asked people, “Should I fire him?” According to The New York Times, Trump “told allies that he was unhappy with the press coverage but that he did not want to be seen as caving to a media swarm.” Though the White House has declared the case closed on Signalgate, the mess has already spread widely. A CBS News–YouGov poll found that “76% said using the app to discuss military plans was not appropriate—including 56% of Republicans.”
During the 2016 election, Trump and the GOP made Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server a cardinal sin. “People have gone to jail for one one hundredth of what—even one one thousandth of what—Hillary Clinton did,” Hegseth said on Fox Business at the time. And Hegseth isn’t alone as a Trump official who once condemned Clinton’s actions but is now downplaying and dismissing Signalgate. Beyond the hypocrisy, what Signalgate provided was a pretty tangible data point to back up the idea that Trumpworld 2.0 is just as bumbling and reckless as Trumpworld 1.0.
Another indication that Trump’s actions could be having political consequences came when he pulled Elise Stefanik’s nomination to be UN ambassador last week. The subtext was clear: Trump was worried about the GOP’s already-narrow House majority and the prospect of losing Stefanik’s once seemingly safe Republican seat in the event of a special election. “She is phenomenal, number one,” he told reporters Friday. “She is a friend of mine…. But she’s very popular in her district, and I didn’t want to take a chance.” Meanwhile, Republicans have been concerned about Tuesday’s race for Florida’s Sixth District, a congressional seat that previously belonged to Signalgate star Waltz and a district Trump won by 30 points less than six months ago.
Trumpism has always been unruly and unable to produce the results it advertises. But Republicans got behind Trump again because gravity is real and they were too weak to stand up to him—and they’ve been largely silent even as things have gone off the rails. Trump reportedly warned automaker CEOs in private not to raise prices in the face of tariffs, “leaving some of them rattled and worried,” according to The Wall Street Journal, and yet he publicly said he “couldn’t care less if they raise prices.” Though Trump may not care about higher prices, 64% of respondents to a recent CBS News–YouGov poll said his administration is not focusing enough on lowering costs for consumers.
Such erratic behavior isn’t going over well in the markets, with the Dow sliding amid Trump’s latest tariff threats and the S&P 500 on track to have its worst quarter since 2022. The problem with moving fast and breaking things, as the mantra goes in Silicon Valley, is that we’re seeing in real time how things get broken.
