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Trump Is Wildly Unpopular—but He Remains a Threat

The Trump brand is tarnished, and his grip over the GOP is loosening—but his authoritarian ambitions have not yet been corralled.

President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media outside the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on April 13, 2026.

For most of Donald Trump’s first presidency and at the start of his second, the MAGA leader’s approval rating hovered in the low 40s—not good but hardly calamitous in an era of perennial discontent with the political classes.

But something has happened in recent months. In poll after poll, Trump’s favorability rating is dipping into the mid-to-low 30s, and on issue after issue, from cost of living to immigration policy, from the ill-thought-out war with Iran to the broader state of the economy, Trump’s signature policies are underwater and getting more so with each successive poll.

Put simply, Trump has overdrawn his political capital by attempting to construct an authoritarian Fortress America. He has turned ICE into a rogue, almost paramilitary, agency but at the cost of his political credibility. He has gone on an imperial real estate spree, talking about or attempting to seize resources from Venezuela and Iran or even the entirety of Greenland and the Panama Canal, but at the cost of fractured alliances and growing anger stateside. He has been drawn into military adventurism overseas but at the cost of increasing disillusionment within his own base. He has shredded decades of investment in and research into renewal energy in an effort to boost the fossil fuel industry—only to run into the political backlash accompanying soaring oil prices that followed the closing of the Strait of Hormuz.

Strongman leaders don’t necessarily need the stamp of public approval to warp the political system in their image. But they do need to maintain their grip on key constituencies to divide and rule a populace. And what we are starting to see is an unraveling of the coalition that Trump used to secure and consolidate his power over the GOP, and by extension the US political and media landscape, for much of the last decade.

Astoundingly, much of the MAGA base now considers Trump a loser—not because of his extremism and irrationality but because he isn’t seen as extreme enough. As detailed in a startling New Yorker article by Antonia Hitchens, a growing number of young men are ditching Trump in favor of the neo-Nazi, misogynistic, and white nationalist politics of Nick Fuentes and his Groyper movement. At the same time, influential conspiracist commentators such as Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson are throwing Trump’s own penchant for........

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