Bulwark Takes - Is the Trump Spell Finally Breaking? Crashing Polls Could Show Crack in His Support.

Episode Date: April 28, 2025

Andrew Egger talks with Sarah Longwell and Lauren Egan about voter frustration, Democratic challenges, and why Trump’s usual excuses might not work this time.

Bettering your business takes working with the best. With the James Hardy Alliance, you gain access to leads, training, networking, and support from the number one brand of siding in North America. Achieve new levels of success by joining the James Hardy Alliance today. Hi, this is Andrew Egger with The Bulwark. Donald Trump's been up to a lot of stuff recently. The public's starting to notice. Wouldn't you know it, they're not super happy about it.

We had a bunch of new polls in over the weekend that have Trump's approval rating hovering right around 40 percent, which is as low as it's been so far in this term, flirting with where he's been at relatively disastrous points in his first term. Here to talk about it, Sarah Longwell, Lauren Egan. Hey, guys, how you doing? Hey, Andrew. Hey, Andrew. Way to go on morning shots. Sarah, let's start with you here. Where are we at? I mean, like we've been we've been clanging the alarm bells on all this stuff for a long time. Obviously, polling is a partial indicator. It's a snapshot in time. It's a lagging indicator. But it really does seem as though these things are starting to add up to to a pretty frosty picture for the president just about 100 days in. Yeah. So a few things. Number one, when I was on

with your buddy Bill Kristol a few weeks back, we were talking about like, what does Trump need to get to in order to have Republicans start to be like, oh, we cannot give this guy everything that he wants. And I'll tell you, Donald Trump's strength, like I think one of the reasons you didn't see as much pushback in early days, it's because he won the popular vote. Like that sense of a popular mandate. Now they way overstate their mandate. But even that sense of a popular mandate, it had Democrats way on their heels doing a lot of soul searching. Right. It gave Trump like nobody balked. I mean, they balked maybe a little bit, but like he got all of his insane picks for the cabinet like Kash Patel because people like, well, I don't know. They voted for this guy. They voted for what he was doing. And then he started fast and furious, hammering away at things. And nobody stopped him because they were like, I don't know.

I guess people like it. They seem to have wanted it. They voted for him. So the meaning of the dive in the polls is that Americans are not happy with the direction that Donald Trump is taking us. All of his move fast, break things stuff, whether it is Doge, whether it's his immigration policies, with the exception of securing the border broadly, but like all the rest of it, the deportations, people still, they care about the economy. This is where with JBL not on, I would like to give you a Sarah's always right pitch, which is he was like, but the economy is great and everybody's fine. I was like, no, there were a lot of people super price sensitive, cared about their grocery bill, thought it was too high. Inflation was still wrecking them. People at the lower income levels,

many of the people who like Donald Trump culturally. And so they voted for him thinking he was a businessman. This is the central conceit of Donald Trump. He's going to lower prices for me when they see prices not coming down and him not seeming to be paying a lot of attention to getting prices down. Like people like, wait, what's happening? I hear this in the focus groups all the time. People who say things are just getting worse with the economy and they were already bad for me.

And so people are feeling not good on basically every front across all vectors. And it matters because at some point it matters for democracy to me. You, Donald Trump, being a failure is good for people saying this is a failed experiment. Having an autocrat is no good for America. It does not lead to better individual outcomes. And frankly, I think that is a good thing. Yeah, that's that's such an interesting point. I had not really thought about it in those terms before. I think a lot of people who saw the outcome of the 2024 election just got really blackpilled about the whole the whole concept that you could talk to people about norms or democracy or institutions at all. But I think that that's absolutely right, that the worst things get for people on the kitchen table is just the more incompetent and just sort of destructive he looks

on all the stuff that they did vote on that they do care about, the more it kind of opens the door to talk about all the other stuff. Let me just get a little bit into the nitty gritty of a couple of these polls because I didn't do that off the top. And these are really kind of striking findings.

Bill Kristol, our buddy that you mentioned, he wrote this up in Morning Shots this morning. I'll just go through three of them that came out this weekend. CNN, in the field, April 17 to 24, Trump has Trump with a 41% job approval rating, 59% disapproval. That's down 7% in the last two months.

And this is also interesting. 22% of respondents strongly approve of his performance, 45% strongly disapprove. ABC News, Washington Post, Ipsos survey, Trump, 39% approval with only 21% strong approval, 55% disapproval, 44% strongly disapprove. So again, 44, 45%, the New York Times poll also has 45% strong disapproval, 28% strong approval. And I think that's kind of shocking to me, because I mean, I think that it's just sort of been a bedrock of how we analyze Donald Trump forever, that he's like, he's got his 35%, that's his core base, right, who are just kind of ride or die for him, come what may, hell or high water. And obviously,

you know, I'm sure that a lot of those people are still pulling the partially approved or moderately approved for these polls. But it really does show the extent to which he's he's on the back foot here. I mean, Lauren, Lauren, what do you make of of just kind of the that that element? I mean, like, are we seeing a real softening among among Trump supporters here? Is there something else that that accounts for that? Yeah, I mean, I think what Sarah said is such an important point about the democracy component of this and sort of rejecting Trump's authoritarian instincts. I think this is a real sort of rejection from voters of some of like the excesses of Trumpism. And I think an important point to your question, this could just be the start of it.

We you know, this is for The New York Times poll. This is the first poll that they've done since the election to this scale. So we need to wait and see. But I think what's really important here is that this could get a lot worse. Trump has, you know, not exactly exhibited a lot of self-control in the past. So will he rein in some of what he's doing on immigration? I don't know. Probably not. Same with the trade war. If that just continues to get worse, this could just be, you know, sort of this could be the best it gets for him for for quite some time. And remember, he is a lame duck. So I think what is going to be interesting to see over the coming weeks

and months is how do Republicans and congressional Republicans start to respond to this? They all have to run for reelection in a year from now. And do they start to sort of, you know, say this rallying behind Trump is coming at too much of a cost that I think, you know, we'll have to wait and see sort of how things play out over the coming months and whether the polls hold as, you know, New York Times and The Post continue to do more of these. But again, I think we have to remember he's a lame duck. Congressional Republicans have to, you know, go run for reelection pretty soon.

Yeah, yeah. They have to win their primaries first. That's going to be one of those things. I mean, there will be people who are going to be willing to call their shot and say, you know, I think this is the moment that congressional Republicans are really finally going to step up. I'm not going to be that guy. I'm going to wait and see. I mean, I will be shocked the first time it happens, no matter what, just given the given the track record, given how how like I mean, that's the one thing that they are still so good at, even amid all this cratering stuff, is they still have that stranglehold on like right wing chains of communication. Everything is always somebody else's fault. It's the judge's fault that the immigration is going badly. It's other countries who are taking advantage of us fault that, you know, the trade war is going poorly or it's it's Howard Letnick or it's Scott Besant. You know, like there's there's always all these excuses. So I will be

interested to see how that filters down. If it's not, you know, like totally agree with you on congressional Republicans, but then it's like the universities, the law firms, is this kind of make it a bit easier for them to be like, oh yeah, like this, this guy's out of office in three and a half years from now. The Supreme Court. Yeah. Right. So, so like, what are we doing here?

If these numbers continue to tank, uh, like what, what's the cost benefit of us sort of caving to him? That calculation starts to dramatically change. Um, so we'll have to see what happens. Yeah. Yeah. The one other thing you mentioned earlier, Sarah, that I just wanted to re-underscore is how all the things are falling, all these numbers are falling in tandem. I mean, I think when the trade war first started really tanking the stock market, there was a scramble. There's a lot of reporting saying that there was a scramble in the White House to basically change

the subject to anything else in that moment. Like, let's get this. Let's get the news cycle off these crashing markets a lot easier said than done. But all the things they're trying to pivot to, the immigration enforcement, you know, the fights with the courts, all that stuff. None of these are like safe landing spaces for them. It starts to look like now. Here's the thing about the economy. Right. And this is I went nuts about this for a while when I was listening to Democrats being like talking about Albrego Garcia is a distraction. We shouldn't do it while the economy is tanking. And I was like, can you guys not do two messages at once? Number one. Number two, the thing about the economy is the economy is a lived experience. Right. The economy has negative

personal consequences on individuals. And so right now what you are starting to see is amid all the chaos of Trump's tariffs on tariffs off, you know, stock stocks go up, stocks go down. Are we firing the Fed chair? Whatever. Amidst all that chaos are a bunch of people who own small businesses, who have investment accounts, who have real reasons why who would participate in the supply chain in some way who are watching what's happening. And you're starting to hear these stories get told. The New York Times, I'm sorry, the Wall Street Journal has a bunch today from some people who are Trump voters.

And I hear these in focus groups who are people saying, I was a Trump voter and now my business is literally being decimated. And as even though some of the tariffs are off, people don't realize many of the tariffs are still on, still new, still impacting business. The uncertainty is wildly affecting not just the markets, but the business. Anybody who owns a small business or participates in a small business who's employed by a small business like this has been bad for Main Street. People are feeling it. So the thing that Democrats need to understand is that Donald Trump is literally doing three quarters of your job for you by wrecking the economy and filling it with uncertainty. And so they're going to have the lived experience of the economy, which is driving his economic numbers down.

And so if you can say not only is he crashing the economy, but he's ignoring the Supreme Court. He is illegally deporting people. And this is what has happened. Some people went on offense on Obrega Garcia. And so that excess pointing to that, those things fuse together to lead to a general perception for people. This is when you talk about vibes. Right. We talk about it's the idea that the cumulative effect of these things overall lead to people being like, dude doesn't know what he's doing. He's not doing a good job. I don't feel good about the direction of the company. I don't understand the ins and outs of the particulars of this. And look, I listened to these voters. I just did an episode with Ann Applebaum where we were really asking voters about sort of the authoritarianism and the deportations. And Trump voters were basically like, I don't know, he's an MS-13 criminal. Like, get him out of here. And so, like, look, he's still going to have but there's enough people who are saying. Is this OK? This doesn't feel OK. And there and like there's a couple of people in the groups who say he's ignoring the Supreme Court. He should not do that. And, you know, so that overall is going to lead to Donald Trump. The numbers go down and the more the numbers go down. This is Lauren just made this point and is extremely important. I don't care how big a lame duck he is. The point is, is when he losing that mandate, losing the perception that the American people are squarely behind him and the things he wants to do makes it makes it a easier for people to stand up. because it's not Trump. It's not just Trump they're afraid of. They're afraid of the fervent

devotion of his followers and the fact that they are going to dominate politics and elections, that Donald Trump can wield them however he wants. And if that is diminished, he becomes much less potent political figure and the fear becomes less potent. And you can really push back. And this is why people need to go on offense and not be afraid. And look, he individually going after people. Can he still do real damage to people? Yes. Does he still going to try to threaten 60 Minutes and CBS over the Paramount job as the manager of the country goes a long way to reducing that mandate. And that's why it's important. That's why it's not just like, oh, let's all look at polls. No, this is a barometer of public support and the public is no longer support. Look at this. This I've got the ABC poll had the economy at 61 percent disapprove. That on an issue of major strength for him.

That's right. Five months ago. Just the central mythology of Trump. He's a good businessman. You take that away from him. It starts to make a big difference in voters minds. You could you could almost look at it like perhaps the most important confrontation over the next three years is Donald Trump versus John Roberts, right? Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. I would way rather live in a world where Donald Trump is the one who's having to look over his shoulder and triage political support and triangulate for for dropping polls rather than John Roberts being the one who's like, gosh, this guy's got this giant mandate.

How am I going to how am I going to prop up the institutional credibility of my institution? Is it going to be important for me to cave on some of this stuff? We'll see how all that goes. Lauren, I wanted to ask you as well. Obviously, all these polls are primarily about Donald Trump. That's the headlines, what we've been talking about all this time. Sarah, you mentioned, you know, the Democratic response to some of this. And it's not as though it's an uncomplicated, like, like super cheery picture for Democrats either. And some of these can you talk about? I forget. Was it the Washington Post poll that that did some of some questions about the Democrats as well? Yeah. Yeah. I think they're in all three of these polls. There's, you know, some mixed news for Democrats, obviously,

to your point. Good news for them that the Trump support is softening. That's something they're obviously going to celebrate. But yeah, the Post poll had, you know, I think seven in 10 say that the Democratic Party is out of touch and six in 10 say the same about Trump. That's obviously been this huge challenge for the Democratic Party. They're trying to sort of figure out how they're not just the party of the elites and the overly educated. They haven't found an answer to that. And then some more positive news in the Times poll on the generic ballot. So that's just a generic Democrat

versus Republican. Democrats do about three points better. My takeaway from that is that Democrats, you know, still have a lot of work to do. I think that there are some Democrats who say who are looking with a lot of hope towards the midterms who think that they they really, you know, will win back the House. That might be true. But these polls really, I think, show that they still have to fine tune their message on some of these things. Sarah was talking about Democrats sort of like bickering about whether or not they should talk about, you know, the deportations. And there was this huge fight that played out in the Democratic Party all last week about like, oh, do we talk about tariffs or do we talk about the deportations and just kind of, you know, going back and forth about how to spend their time. And I think what they learned from that is if you go and you talk about the deportations and you tell Americans why they should care about

it and why this is bad, you have a role to play in shaping public opinion. And this has kind of been the the one of the fights that have played out in the Democratic Party really since the beginning of the Trump administration. It's what role do you have to play in shaping public opinion? Do you just let Trump kind of like drown himself or do you get out there and try and sort of drag those numbers down as much as you can? So I think we'll kind of see see folks start to talk about all of these issues a bit more and realize that you can do a bunch of things at once, even if the fundamental main message you're going to try and get across is the economy at the end of the day. All of these things

play a piece, play a piece. And yeah, I think this this poll for them shows that, you know, good news, but also they have a they have work to do. Sarah, let me get one more vibe check from you on that, just because when when when you're looking at Democrats are out of touch, right? I mean, that could mean two things, right? That there could be people responding to that who are like the Democrats are out of touch, right? I mean, that could be two things, right? That there could be people responding to that who are like, the Democrats are out of touch because I don't like all the woke stuff. But then there's also this whole other trench of like probably pretty strongly progressive voters who are like, the Democrats are out of touch because the world is burning down. I don't see them really like responding sufficiently to that. I mean, like,

how do you parse out where voters are on this stuff? So when Lauren and I did our focus group pod episode together and we were talking about the Democrats, right, we did two groups. We did a bunch of groups of Democrats who thought the party needed to be more progressive. And then we did a bunch of groups of people who thought the Democratic Party needed to be more moderate. So all Democrats both had different visions of where the party should go to be more effective. And yet, Lauren and I can both tell you, listening to those groups, they mostly it wasn't about moderate or progressive. It was about being aggressive. Right. They wanted to see their leaders, their Democratic leaders. And look, if you're more

moderate, that's basically meant you wanted to see like the Cory Bookers of the world doing it. And if you're more progressive, you wanted to see AOC doing it. But like everybody wanted to see their Democratic leaders going out there and fighting back and saying like why this was wrong. And so their frustration with Democrats, I think, shows up in those low numbers. I don't think it's just because of the woke stuff. I think when you see approval ratings for Democrats down in like the 20s, it is a there's a a collective yawp coming from like the guts of the Democratic Party saying, go do something. Would you say something? My God. I mean, Cory Booker's performative 25 hours on his feet. People loved that, not because they thought it

made a huge difference, because it like expressed in some physical way the thing that they're desperate to see happen. And so I think you could see those Democrats have got to stop thinking about roll over and play dead and let Trump do it himself. And like go on offense and be aggressive as like that's a false choice. Let Trump is doing a bunch of bad things. Tell people it's Trump's fault. Like the idea that you don't in this new communications environment have to be a constant presence and helping to shape public opinion and tell stories to people and help them understand what's happening is is a fundamental problem for

Democrats is that they don't know how to just do this as a relentless machine the way that Republicans do. And so stop getting caught up in like the do I do this or do I just go everything everywhere all at once. Bad movie. Good communication strategy. I liked that movie, but we don't have to fight about it. We can leave it there. I see it.

Saw it three or four times. Really good movie. Go watch it. Don't watch it. I don't care. We'll leave it there. Thank you all for watching. Thanks for tuning in. Hope you all subscribe to the channel. go over to the bulwark dot com read my newsletter read lauren's newsletter listen to all of sarah's podcast

watch her focus groups lots of good stuff thanks for watching we'll see you all next time