On Resisting Trump...
Donald Trump is unpopular, and forgetting this is dangerous
This newsletter is to share perspectives on the social world, especially American politics. And what a time to start writing about that subject.
The first post is not something new but rather something I wrote on November 11, 2024, in the wake of Donald Trump’s reelection and what I saw as the dangerous misinterpretation of his popularity. I never published it for various reasons, but it holds even more true now than it was then.
There isn’t a lot of data yet, but it appears that Trump has the weakest presidential “honeymoon”, the period in which the president enjoys increased support post-inauguration, of any president in modern history, except for himself in his first term when he was even more dismally unpopular than he is now. Trump simply isn’t popular, and he will continue to become even less popular, both because this is the historical path of nearly all previous presidents and because he is already doing really unpopular things.
But this unpopularity hasn’t prevented many public figures from debasing themselves by genuflecting to him. For the titans of industry in Silicon Valley, who are particularly shameless in this behavior, it seems that much of their motivation is simply a desire to take part in Trump’s unbridled use of government to enrich himself and his associates. Or maybe Trump’s right-wing beliefs are just more consistent with their own worldview, and now that they don’t see an advantage in professing the “wokism” that dominated discourse a few years ago, they are letting their true colors fly. One way or another, they are playing a dangerous game with democracy.
For the rest of us who don’t have a direct material interest in Trump’s crony capitalism, we will probably pick our battles, and because we are human, our choice of battles will be primarily based on what battles we think other people are fighting. Unfortunately, there are already voices telling us that resisting Trump is the wrong approach. Setting aside the ethical imperative of resisting attacks on democracy, whether the strategy is politically expedient or not, it is important to remember that resisting Trump should be easy because what he stands for simply isn’t popular. If you are resisting, most people are with you.
Here is what I wrote on November 11:
In the United States around 245 million people are eligible to vote. Of those, only 78 million, less than 1 in 3, voted for Donald Trump to be President in 2024. This is not to deny the legitimacy of his election. He won fair and square. But it’s important to understand that not only did only a minority of Americans actually vote for Trump but most Americans don’t even like him: in one of the last polls before the election, only 42% of adults had a favorable opinion of Trump.
Much post-election commentary might give you a different impression. The New York Times on November 6th declared that the election meant that we lived in “Trump’s America” and that it signaled a “different kind of country,” reshaped in Trump’s image. Mother Jones opined that Trump’s victory “signals a national embrace of the politics of hate.” Reuters interviewed liberals who were convinced they were now “firmly a minority” in America. Not only do such headlines imply a popularity for Trump that simply does not exist, but they imply that America, or at least most Americans, approve of the cruel policies on which Trump campaigned or, even more alarming, approve of his authoritarian tendencies.
But this simply isn’t true. Survey data shows that voters preferred Harris’ policy proposals over Trump’s, including on Trump’s key issues: for example most Americans oppose mass deportation and, contra Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric, a strong majority of Americans want immigration levels to remain the same or even increase. Moreover, many voters seemed to support Trump, not because of his policies, but in spite of them: nearly half of voters who said abortion should be legal in most cases, still voted for Trump. And, perhaps most importantly, polls show that an overwhelming majority of Americans condemn Trump’s blatantly anti-democratic behavior in his first term. Qualitatively, journalists have found over and over again, that even Trump’s most ardent supporters try to rationalize or overlook his authoritarian rhetoric. True supporters of such actions are a fringe, even within the Republican party. Simply put, Trump’s approach to democracy, Trump’s policies, and Trump himself are not popular.
Given this unpopularity, how then did Trump win? It’s not because he represents America’s zeitgeist. Rather, he was carried to victory by forces that had little to do with him and caused voters to look beyond their distaste for him. To see this, consider that the election fell squarely and predictably within recent global patterns. Post-covid, incumbent parties, have been losing elections across the world. These losing parties have been on both the left and right, indicating voter dissatisfaction was likely due to common forces of inflation, the same factor causing dissatisfied voters in the United States to reject the incumbent Democratic party.
Political scientists have long recognized that voters tend to vote against incumbent parties when economically dissatisfied. In the two-party system, even when the alternative is not particularly attractive, voters motivated to reject the incumbent have only one choice. In fact, so powerful is this historical trend that even when looking only at economic data, political scientists were months ago able to predict the outcome of every state and, therefore, perfectly predict the electoral college. It seems that Trump was elected, not because of anything special about Trump, but because of the historical happenstance of him not being the incumbent. When the votes are all counted, he will likely have about a 1.7 point lead, the smallest margin of victory in a Presidential election since 2000—a win, but hardly a landslide—and, according to some models, an underperformance compared to what might be expected for a challenger facing such a favorable electoral environment. This underperformance is probably because so many voters simply don’t like or what he represents.
Why does it matter whether Americans actually like Trump and his policies? After all, he will be President, whether most Americans like him or not. The reason we need to be clear about Trump’s continuing unpopularity is because by attributing support for Trump that doesn’t exist, we run the risk of normalizing him and thus emboldening his worse instincts.
Norms are what we believe others find acceptable and, therefore, what behavior we think will be tolerated. In America, despite the election of an unpopular president promising authoritarian actions, there is still a strong anti-authoritarian norm. But this norm can be fragile. Political scientists have shown, for example, how in Spain, a chance burst of nationalism following an election caused people to believe their neighbors were more authoritarian than they actually were. With this misperception, the anti-authoritarian norm eroded and authoritarianism became more acceptable in practice.
Similarly, we don’t want a situation in the United States where even though most Americans reject Trump’s authoritarian behavior, journalists and politicians take his election as a sign that these behaviors are acceptable. Congress, full of politicians seeking reelection, will do what they perceive as popular and if they incorrectly believe that Trump’s authoritarian tendencies enjoy majority support, they will be more likely to abdicate their constitutional duty of checking Trump’s abuses. Senator Marco Rubio already used Trump’s supposed “landslide” victory as an excuse to give him deference in cabinet appointments, even for such manifestly unfit candidates as Robert Kennedy. Even the courts, the guardians of the constitutional order by way of judicial review, have been shown by political science research to be influenced in their decisions by public opinion and so they too may be swayed by a misperception of Trump’s popularity.
This is not to say that Democrats, the losers of the election, don’t have soul searching to do. Losing to a candidate who is so unliked and manifestly unfit to be President means something needs to change. Decades of victories in the popular vote have allowed them to look past the long-term drift of working-class Americans toward the Republican party. Now they must confront the reality that Democrats, putatively the party of the left, and therefore economic liberalism, has failed in important ways. But accepting this reality, if coupled with a misinterpretation of Trump’s popularity, can lead Democrats to the wrong conclusion, allowing them to believe it is America that has a problem, not them. It can become an excuse to think that issues of character don’t matter to voters—or worse, as some people have claimed, that Democrats have lost elections because the working class is hopelessly lost in the thrall of Trump’s racism. This only gives the party a self-serving excuse for its own failures.
Moreover, Democrats making the mistake of thinking Trump is popular and failing to oppose Trump because they believe the “people have spoken” can lead to a moral flimsiness. Already, I sense a “it’s time to move aside” attitude forming among some who previously opposed Trump. But from an ethical point of view, majority support, even if Trump had it, does not render his policies just. If Trump’s governing approach was illiberal on November 4th, it remains illiberal today. If his policies were cruel on November 4th, they remain cruel today. No amount of popular support will change that. But, even so, Trump doesn’t have this popular support. Remembering this should make it even easier to do the right thing.