The Free Press
Has it really been only 36 days since President Trump took office? It feels longer, because of all the radical policy changes he’s crammed into the time since January 20. According to the key author of that shake-up, DOGE chief Elon Musk, Trump is simply acting on the mandate he won on November 5.
“The people voted for major government reform, and that’s what people are going to get,” Musk said in the Oval Office recently. “They’re going to get what they voted for.”
Is that true, though? The 77,284,118 people who voted for Trump, 49.8 percent of the total, wanted a change from the Biden administration. But did they want all of this?
Maybe not. Early data suggest that voters certainly approve of many of his policies, like his crackdown on illegal immigration and getting biological boys and men out of girls’ and women’s sports, as well as restricting the medicalized treatment for “gender dysphoria” in minors. Also popular: ditching DEI in favor of a color-blind meritocracy and pursuing an “all-of-the-above” energy policy.
DOGE, however, is another story.
On a superficial reading of the data, it would appear that the public is on board with Musk’s attempt to root out government waste. A recent New York Times poll found 60 percent of the public agreed that government “is almost always wasteful and inefficient,” a view especially prevalent (64 percent) among working-class (noncollege) respondents. Meanwhile, the public believes, by a 72 percent to 25 percent margin, that the government is “mostly working to benefit itself and the elites” rather than “mostly working to benefit the people and the country.”
But the public’s support for DOGE depends on two conditions. First, voters must believe the Trump administration is attacking actual waste and inefficiency rather than cutting government arbitrarily. Second, voters must feel sure they won’t be harmed by cuts.
On both counts, DOGE is asking for trouble. DOGE has indeed found many examples of highly questionable government expenditures and related inefficiencies, such as processing federal employee retirements using paper, by hand, in an abandoned limestone mine in Pennsylvania. But it has used blunt tools, such as wholesale layoffs and spending freezes, that go further than the ostensible goal of eliminating government waste. How does stopping funding for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) in Africa square with this objective? Or for that matter, the firing of all “provisional” government employees, which reduces headcount through the questionable means of getting rid of the youngest and most energetic employees?
Ordinary people enjoy visiting the national parks. And yet DOGE has sliced a thousand workers from that beloved agency, with no particular justification, prompting employees to stage a protest at Yosemite National Park, in which they hung an American flag upside down from the peak of El Capitan. The park worker who led the protest was a military veteran, like 30 percent of the federal workforce.
And so it’s no surprise that the polls show ebbing support for DOGE. Musk’s favorability rating has been rapidly declining; in a recent Washington Post/Ipsos poll, his approval rating for his work within the federal government was just 34 percent. In a recent CNN/SSRS poll, respondents by almost 2 to 1 thought that Trump erred by giving Musk a prominent role in his administration. Views among working-class respondents were only slightly less negative.
In the same poll, 55 percent thought Trump so far hasn’t paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems whereas 45 percent thought he had “the right priorities.” Trump’s approval rating may still be net positive, and higher than at any point in his first term, but it has fallen from +8 on Inauguration Day to around +1 today, according to the RealClearPolitics average of the polls.
Warning signs are also flashing on a clear voter priority: the economy. In the Washington Post poll, 76 percent of respondents rate current gas or energy prices either “not so good” or “poor,” 73 percent said the same of the incomes of average Americans, and 92 percent said it about food prices. In the CNN poll, only 27 percent think Trump has been “about right” on trying to reduce the price of everyday goods, compared to 62 percent who believe he hasn’t “gone far enough.” And that is before any of the big tariffs Trump is threatening have come into effect.
This is the data’s message: Trump was elected to shake up the system, but in the service of specific popular priorities that Democrats ignored, especially cutting illegal immigration and improving living standards. He was not elected to do what excites the most online segment of his GOP base or what suits his personal priorities, such as across-the-board government cuts and pardoning the January 6 defendants.
In short, Trump may be overinterpreting his mandate, just as Biden did in 2021. From the excesses of DOGE to fanciful ideas like a U.S. takeover of Gaza, this is not what voters signed up for. Coming soon: the possibility of massive cuts to Medicaid to support tax cuts, which is likely to be highly unpopular with many of those who voted for him. Trump has the chance to build an enduring majority coalition. But by overreaching, he is laying the ground for a Democratic comeback—and further political stalemate.
This has become a familiar pattern in recent political history. As my AEI colleague Yuval Levin and I wrote in a paper last year called Politics Without Winners, parties have time and again “prioritized the wishes of their most intensely devoted voters—who would never vote for the other party—over the priorities of winnable voters who could go either way. . . . They have focused on fan service—satisfying their most partisan and loyal constituencies.”
Thirty-six days into Trump 2.0, that still sounds right.
The story of the JFK conspiracy theory isn’t just about a few hucksters red-pilling traumatized boomers. No. It’s also about how the government squandered its most precious asset: the trust of the American people. Last week on Breaking History, Eli Lake examined the chain of events that led Donald Trump to declassify the remaining files on JFK’s assassination.