Is Trump Starting to Wear Out His Welcome?

Political Notes

by Jon Fuhrman

Friday, June 13.  We continue to get hints here and there that the Trump train is rolling over some uneven tracks.  Yet, while we wait, the Administration is going all in on multiple, hugely dangerous and destructive initiatives.

While the courts are slogging through the various legal challenges to the Administration’s mass deportations, President Trump is demanding that Homeland Security meet unrealistically high weekly quotas on apprehension of undocumented immigrants.  As a natural bureaucratic response to that demand, Immigration agents have turned from looking for those handful of immigrants that have actually been found guilty of felonies to, instead, mass raids in attempts to sweep up dozens or hundreds of victims at a time, so they can more easily meet their weekly quotas.

Then, when a community resists, as did people in Los Angeles, the President jumps on the modest amount of violence that did happen as an excuse to federalize the National Guard and call in the Marines to assist them.  So far, though, there has been essentially nothing for the troops to do.

At the same time, despite a dramatic decision by the U.S. Court of International Trade that the entire regimen of tariffs was illegal, the Administration has won procedural stays in the US Federal District Court of Appeals and has proceeded to use the tariffs aggressively in a huge game of chicken with our closest trading partners.  This has an enormously destructive impact on trade and on our economy in general, with increasing numbers of investment and economic analysts seeing decreased productivity, decreased economic growth, and a potential recession on the horizon. 

While all this is happening, the GOP delegations in the House and Senate are trying to patch together all the convoluted strands of policy and pique in the President’s “One Big Beautiful Bill”.  The internal strains are becoming quite evident, with key Senators predicting the Senate will pass something quite different from the House version, and it will take a month, or maybe even longer, for the Conference Committee of the two Houses to find common ground that does not terminally enrage one key faction or another.  The problem they face is that there are just too many distinct factions, with some directly and explicitly opposed to each other’s demands, so finding common ground or an acceptable compromise may be a Sisyphean task.

And while all that is going on, the world seems to be falling apart.  The war in the Ukraine continues unabated, with the President both getting angrier at Putin but also perhaps getting more likely to just walk away, leaving Ukraine in the lurch.  He has not done that yet, perhaps because of internal pressure within the Administration itself.  (Who wants to be remembered as the guy who “lost” Ukraine?)  Further, there is a bill supported by 80 Senators (take that, you doubters of bipartisanship!) that would hugely tighten sanctions on Russia and, more importantly, also impose secondary sanctions on any country or organization doing business with Russia or Russian entities.  That bill is supported by Senate leadership on both sides, so it may well pass.  Further, it probably has majority support in the House, so it might reach the floor even over the opposition of the Speaker.

Then there is Israel and Iran.  While there is no doubt that Iran should not have nuclear weapons, and has, at least in theory, pledged to destroy Israel, the latest attack by Israel directly on Iran and its leadership and nuclear facilities has, in capital letters, opened the proverbial can of worms.  Iran will retaliate, which begets more Israeli retaliation, which begets more Iranian retaliation, and on and on endlessly.  However unpopular the rigid theocratic regime may be in Iran, Israeli attacks will not pave the way for regime change.  Indeed, exactly the opposite is likely the case.  Further, Iran has far more levers to push, more proxies to activate, and more strings to pull to wear down a much smaller, and already war-weary, Israeli population.

The weight of all these things is clearly having an effect on Americans’ opinions on the Administration.  Poll after poll shows declining approval; the latest Quinnipiac polling shows the President’s approval rating has fallen into the high 30’s.  That’s where Joe Biden was, at the depths of his popularity.  So if the President were facing reelection this year, he’d be in real trouble, probably unrecoverable.  But he’s not.  Worse, he doesn’t really care.  He is on a mission, and he believes he might remake America in his image, and he’s bound and determined to proceed.  So there is a lot of pain on the horizon, for immigrants, for Americans as a whole, for the global economy.  The courts are working, slowly, to constrain some of his imperious actions, and Congress is starting to show some cracks as individuals slowly peel off, but it will be a rocky 18 months until the mid-term elections force some real course corrections.