The Daily - Americans to Trump: You’ve Gone Too Far

Episode Date: April 28, 2025

Warning: This episode contains strong language.One question that has hung over the first 100 days of President Trump’s second term: Is his aggressive approach to everything from deportations to tariffs what most Americans want — or has he simply gone too far?In a major new nationwide poll, voters tell The New York Times exactly how they feel about Trump’s agenda.Nate Cohn, The Times’s chief political analyst, explains the results.Guest: Nate Cohn, the chief political analyst for The New York Times.Background reading: Voters see President Trump’s use of power as overreaching, a Times/Siena poll found.Four perspectives on Mr. Trump’s weak poll numbers.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Photo: Eric Lee/The New York Times Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

My name is Emily Haraldson and I voted for Donald J. Trump. My name is Darrell Davis. I'm a never Trump Republican. I voted for Kamala Harris. I voted for Kamala Harris. I voted for Trump. I voted for Trump. From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarro.

This is The Daily. I think the first hundred days has been great. I just wish he had more backing. His first hundred days has been great. I just wish he had more backing. His first hundred days have been disastrous. Probably the worst hundred days of any president in history. The question hovering over President Trump's first 100 days in office is whether his extraordinarily aggressive approach to everything from tariffs to deportations is exactly what most Americans wanted. I can see in the short term things seem a little crazy, but I think change is good.

The best thing he's done is close the border. Doge is like the best thing he could have done. Or I don't love all the tariff stuff. You know, it's been harmful to people's pocketbooks. When it comes to immigration, you did it, but damn how you did it though. That's the tariff stuff. You know, it's been harmful to people's pocketbooks. When it comes to immigration, you did it, but damn how you did it though. That's the part that hurts. If he's simply gone too far.

I feel that he's already done more harm in his first hundred days than he did in the four years he was in office in his first term. Today, in a major new nationwide poll, voters tell the Times exactly how they feel about Trump's agenda so far. My colleague Nate Cohn is our guest. It's Monday, April 28th. Nate?

Michael. Welcome back. Thanks for having me. You kind of went into a post-election hibernation of sorts and now you have awakened. I'm sort of dozing in and out. Haven't gotten all the way, uh, haven't got my coffee yet. Thanks for making time for us. This is a pretty big occasion for you and the world of New York Times polling. You're now out with our first poll since the election, time to President Trump's first hundred days in office. You're basically taking the country's temperature on most of the

major facets of what he has done so far in the first three months. So high level, what did you find about how Americans are feeling about this presidency 100 days in? High level, we found that the public has a lot of reservations about Donald Trump's first hundred days. In fact, I think it's pretty hard to find a single number that's good for Donald Trump in this poll. We can debate about how bad some of the numbers are, but almost every question that we asked voters offered to varying degrees, a negative reaction to the way he's handled his job, whether overall or on the issues.

And what is that top line, not good number that we should hold in our heads? The simple number to hold in your head is that 42% of voters say they approve of Donald Trump's performance as president compared to 54% who disapprove. In political journalism, we call this being underwater. More people disapprove of you than approve of you. It's not a good thing. And it comes so soon after Trump won the presidency with what I remember was a number meaningfully higher than 42%.

Yeah, that's right. And when this represents a pretty marked decline from where he was standing in our poll and taking in January before Trump actually entered office when he was still riding high in his post-election honeymoon, historically this now gives him the lowest approval rating of anyone at this stage of his term with the possible exception it's close of himself eight years ago and of course Donald Trump did go on to lose four years later so this is not a he's not in great company. So given all that how were you thinking about this number at this moment given everything

that has happened in these first hundred days? Well Donald Trump there's almost always two ways to look at his numbers on the one hand. They're usually pretty bad They're under 50% They're usually among the worst for any president and on the other hand. They're not Catastrophically bad his base is usually still on his side There's a reason why he only narrowly lost in 2020 and then actually won in 2024 And so these are two ways that we can always look at Donald Trump and he finds himself right back where he sort of has usually been in his career.

I think that this go around, I would be inclined to take the more pessimistic interpretation, to dwell on how weak he is so soon after his victory and given the political opportunities that he has rather than focus on the glass half full case. Why? Why are you taking the pessimistic view? So one reason is that Donald Trump entered this term with real political opportunities. He had a chance to push a bold agenda that

had the support of the public. And I think immigration is the best example here. A majority of voters, even in this poll, support deporting undocumented immigrants. That's what Trump was elected to do. And yet, despite that, voters disapprove of his handling of immigration. And they say he's gone too far in immigration enforcement. So he has this opportunity, this term, to be on a much stronger political footing than

he is in the past. And he has already forfeited it with the excesses of his policy on immigration. We can talk about the details of that. Yeah, well, let's do that. Let's talk about some of the details of where opportunity has been replaced by, as you just used this word, excess. So 40% approve of his handling of immigration, even though this is sort of the issue that if there was anything

he ought to be popular on, given the cards that he had in his hand when he was elected this is it. And exactly why? It sounds like it's going to be about him maybe taking it too far. That's exactly right. In fact, we asked voters whether they thought Trump's immigration policy is going too far or is about right or doesn't go far enough and a majority of voters say he's going too far.

And one example in the poll is his handling of the Kilmar Obrego Garcia case, the man who was deported mistakenly to a prison in El Salvador. Only 32% of voters approve of his handling of the case, 52% disapprove. And it's cases like Garcia, and there are other cases out there that have been in the news over the last month that are dragging down his overall approval rate on immigration. If voters were instead focused on the huge declines in apprehensions at the border or efforts to deport people who on stronger legal footing, I would guess that a majority of

voters would approve of his handling of immigration. But because we're focused on this area where he's acting in defiance of the courts and also clearly in our polls view in defiance of public opinion, he has undermined what ought to be a relatively strong position on what has been his strongest issue. So even on an issue that helped Trump win the election, immigration, what you're seeing in this poll is that there are lines voters don't want him to cross. And in this case, they think he has crossed it.

And in the process, he's turned what could be majority support for his approach to immigration into, instead, disapproval. turned what could be majority support for his approach to immigration into instead disapproval. That's right if there's anything from the poll it's Trump going too far. We asked this exact question on a number of issues. His tariffs cuts to government employment, his changes in general to the political economic system. On all of the questions an outright majority of voters say the president is going too far. Let's talk about those one at a time because they seem worthy of examination. Let's, for example, talk through Doge and let's talk about his handling of the economy.

Doge is probably the issue where Trump is maybe holding up the best. This is, of course, relative. 52% of voters say they're going too far with their cuts to the federal workforce. So this is his best issue that we're asking about. But even on this issue, he's underwater. Okay. What about the economy? Not good for the president either. Already a majority of voters say the president's actions have made the economy worse. They say the economy has gotten worse over the last year. And one of the president's big strengths in the 2024 campaign the idea that his policies were gonna help you personally Has been reversed voters now think his policies are hurting them and will continue to hurt them over the next four years And then on the other sort of broader questions

I was just talking about like whether he's gone too far whether people approve of Trump whether they support the tariffs themselves and all of Those issues voters Overwhelmingly disapprove of the president's tariffs, think he's going too far, and disapprove of his handling of the economy. There are no bright spots there for him. Nate, what did the poll find about what I might describe as the universe of ways in which the president has expanded executive authority and used it to pursue, in some cases, punish his enemies and ideological opponents.

So we asked whether voters thought Trump was exceeding the powers available to him as president. And a majority of voters, 54%, think that he's going beyond the powers that are available to him as president. And only 43% think he's acting within his legal rights. One of my favorite questions in the poll, we asked whether people thought Donald Trump was making major changes, minor changes to the economic and political system or trying to just tear down the system altogether. And when we asked this question last year, we were asking what kind of change people want. Do you want major change, minor change,

or do you want to tear down the system? And most people wanted major changes, but very few people wanted to tear the system down completely. And we people wanted major changes, but very few people wanted to tear the system down completely. And we found that 35% of people already in less than 100 days perceived the president as attempting to completely tear down the system. Higher than the number that wanted it a year ago. Much higher than the number that wanted a year ago. Fascinating. And they see those changes as bad. We just straight up asked, I mean, do you think these

changes are good or bad? A majority said they were bad. And a majority also said that the president is going too far in trying to change the political and economic system in the country. I should also note, we're only at the beginning of Trump's term. And we asked a variety of questions about places where Trump might go in the future, like defying the Supreme Court or attempting to deport US citizens to El Salvador, as he suggested he might. And on those issues, there's essentially zero public support for pursuing those more extreme measures that would defy the most fundamental norms of due process and the separation of powers. Right. And as we talked about a lot on the show, the president has openly defied our

norms around separation of powers by shutting down agencies, for example, that have been congressionally funded and openly talking about, and in some cases doing, the act of ignoring judicial rulings. So what this all seems to suggest is that the voters who put Trump in the White House wanted major change, that phrase you used, and the poll found a year ago. And what they got was a president who, in many cases, is instead tearing things down.

And the gap between that desire and reality seems to account for the big finding of this poll, which is they don't like it. I think that's a great summary, Michael. And I do think it's worth noting that most Trump supporters remain on his side. Overwhelming majority of people who voted for Trump last November still approve of his performance today. In fact, most strongly approve of his performance. But those voters that put him over the top, the kinds of voters who didn't vote for him in 2020 or 2016,

but then gave him a victory in the popular vote, those voters have peeled away from him. And in particular, one of the groups that swung most to him in the last election, young voters, right? Seemed you have snapped back in this poll. It's only one poll. When we're talking about a small subsample and it's one poll, I need to put this caveat out there that maybe it's just small sample, but young voters in this poll overwhelmingly disapproved of the president's performance.

69% disapproved compared to 26% who approved. Wow. And last November, young voters were fairly closely contested with Kamala Harris only winning a bare majority. This kind of big lopsided 69 to 26 margin against the president and young voters. We didn't find anything like this in any of our polls over the last few years. What do you make of it? Well, again, there's a big group of voters who were deeply dissatisfied by the Biden

administration and were frankly exhausted with democratic governance, the excesses of woke and the pandemic response and rising costs and so on. And they gave Donald Trump a chance. Right. And many of them are being reminded of the reasons they didn't like Trump in the first place. And others may outright be repelled by the excesses of his conduct even when they were sympathetic to his aims.

In other words, the young voters peeling away from him after the first hundred days were the least likely to have wanted him to pursue the most extreme versions of these policies in the first place. That's exactly right. Of course, the big question, and what I want us to talk about after the break, is how much any of this matters for a president who does not seem to care much at all about public opinion, whose party is profoundly afraid of him and not operating in any way as a check against him in Congress. And as a result seems kind of immune to the result of a poll like this. I think it does matter. And I think that although the president may not care about the result

of a poll, and I actually think he kind of does care about the results of polls personally, Michael, it's just my interpretation. I think that it does affect things he does care about. All right. Well, let's discuss that when we come back. We'll be right back. So Nate, talk about why a poll like this does matter in this unique political environment in which the president, as I just said before the break, seems pretty thoroughly insulated for now from the blowback to what people regard as the excesses of his first hundred days.

So I think that before I offer the reasons why I think this does matter, and in particular could matter more later, I think it is worth acknowledging that the president to this point is probably pretty insulated from these results. A 42% approval rating isn't great, but it's not a political catastrophe. His base is still mostly on his side. As you alluded to congressional Republicans Aren't going to break away from him based simply on the result of this poll But I think that the biggest reason why this number would be concerning to the White House is because

This isn't necessarily the end of his fall There's a lot of reason to think that the president's approval ratings have been in sort of steady decline Over the last month or two None of the factors that are driving down the president's approval rating are in the rearview mirror yet. They're still happening They're still potentially exerting a downward pull On his numbers right the president also can continue to take additional measures that could continue To drag his approval ratings down further.

Right, the trade war shows no signs of abating. There are legally questionable deportations that are still happening. We haven't yet had a full-on confrontation with the judiciary, even though one may be brewing. The president has talked about deporting citizens to El Salvador. I'm not saying he's going to do that, but if he does, then he's at risk of losing even more support The point is that the actions that the president has taken this point have already done discernible political damage and if he continues with this pattern of conduct He risks additional damage and it's worth noting that we're talking about Trump's core strengths here the economy and immigration So he's risking his the foundation of his appeal for large segments of the electorate.

And that's why you're suggesting that these poll numbers, bad as they are, could get even worse. Absolutely. And although it's true that today the president isn't at much risk to lose support from Republicans or something, I think it's worth noting just how quickly he could get into trouble because the majority that the Republicans have in Congress is so thin because he depends so much on maintaining an aura of dominance and because large elements of our society to this point have stayed on the sideline.

They haven't really forcefully spoken out against the president. And as it becomes clear that a large share of the public disapproves of the president, people feel more emboldened to come out against him. What you're describing is an invitation for resistance that would be validated by a poll like this. Yeah. I mean, we live in a democracy that values public opinion in some deep way. No one likes polling, but everyone really cares about whether a majority of the country is on your side. And there is a moral weight to having a majority of the country on your side.

There was a moral weight to Trump winning the popular vote, for instance, that he didn't possess in 2016. And that gets taken away from him here. And I think that there will be practical consequence to that, especially given the breadth of his ambitions. Well, talk about the practical consequences. I'm going to guess some of that might have to do with elections that are still a little bit a ways off midterms, but also perhaps with what Republicans in Congress might be willing to tolerate when they're called upon to defend what this poll has found are some of these excesses.

Yeah. As I alluded to, the Republicans have a very narrow majority in the House, and that creates two major risks to them. One is that they could lose control of the chamber in an election. The poll, by the way, found Democrats with a lead on what we call the generic ballot, which is the question asking whether you want Democrats or Republicans to control Congress. And they want Democrats to control the poll. And they want Democrats to control Congress. So that's one risk. The second risk is that even if the Republicans have controlled Congress until November 2028,

he may not have a governing majority in the House if he can't keep nearly every member of the chamber in line. And as the president's approval rating sinks, there are greater incentives for moderate Republicans from districts that voted for Kamala Harris or only narrowly voted for Donald Trump to defy the president in their pursuit of reelection. And there may just be genuinely skeptical members of Congress who feel emboldened to oppose his agenda on the merits because they know that the president is weak. That would threaten his ability to extend his tax cuts to slash entitlement programs

or anything else he may want from the congress. And then the president's situation could find himself almost as like a lame duck sooner than later if the trends in the poll were to continue. Right, if you're a swing district Republican and you look at these numbers, you recognize that staying too closely attached to Trump might cost you your seat. And then the incentive structure that we normally think about, which is, I don't want to piss off this president,

starts to maybe change. Exactly, and there are other organizations and people and institutions who might be likelier to resist President Trump, then they would if he had a 55% approval rating, a law firm under attack, a university, the judiciary. All of these groups are ever so subtly affected by whether they feel like they have the wind of public opinion at their back. And as the president's ratings sink, I think they become likelier, maybe even only slightly likelier, but likelier nonetheless to oppose the president.

Nate, since you just brought up those institutions that have been, in some cases, persecuted and prosecuted by this presidency, I wonder how you're thinking about what this poll tells us about one of the great questions throughout the campaign and in the first hundred days of this presidency, which is how we're supposed to think about a new and by many measures more authoritarian version of the presidency. I mean, clearly this poll finds that many Americans are seeing excesses in it, and yet it's not stopping the president from pursuing a far more robustly powerful version of the executive branch. I thought that both in generalities and in specifics, the poll provided a lot of evidence

that there was very little public support for Trump to claim an even more assertive and powerful version of the presidency than he already has. Some of this is already beginning to hurt him politically as we talked about in the context of the Garcia case, and as we talked about with this whole idea that the president is going too far. I mean, almost every excess we're talking about are cases where the president is stretching

his authority beyond what we would have agreed in the past the president could undertake on his own. Should he go even farther, the president faces really serious political risk, according to the poll. If he were to outright defy the judiciary, for instance, only 6% of voters said that the president should be allowed to defy a Supreme Court ruling. Only 26% of voters said that the president should just do whatever they think is best even that means going outside of the existing rules Compared to two-thirds who say that the president needs to follow the existing rules people want their president to operate within the bounds of

The Constitution and it's like that on every question and they're not close either. You know, we have a very polarized country We're used to 50-50 elections We're used to issues where the parties are, you know between 40 and 60 percent on these kind of big executive power questions about whether the president gets to go beyond the limits that have been imposed on presidents in the past. We're talking about a quarter of the electorate or less that's on his side. The overwhelming majority of the public is just not there for this, including, to flip the glass now to being half empty for a second, half of Republicans won't be there for him. That's the scenario where congressional support would quickly start to break down, I think.

But if the president doesn't care, and if the midterms aren't for what, a year and a half or so, it still could mean a lot of big changes, a much more forceful, powerful executive branch that's not responsive to those numbers you just talk about, and maybe even a constitutional crisis that's- Yeah, you're moving outside of the realm of public opinion here, right? Because the means by which various institutions can respond to the president may be much more limited than the public reaction against him. So it's totally possible the president can pursue a wide-ranging agenda that goes well beyond what any president has done in the past, that the courts and the Congress fail to check him, even though a majority of the public is opposed. That's

a real possibility. Nonetheless, over the medium to longer term, this tremendous amount of public opposition to the excesses of the presidency to this point, let alone the more extreme scenarios we're contemplating, would make it very difficult for the president to sustain this kind of conduct over the longer term in a world where the Democrats have taken control of the House, let alone if you imagine the president seeking a third term, or even if he doesn't seek a third term, simply if there's another Republican who gets elected, whether they could continue to pursue these policies. This kind of public opinion makes a lasting change like this much more difficult, I think, to sustain. And, you know, I should say that when we look at this in the

context of a broader rise of right-wing populist authoritarianism across the world in places like Hungary or Turkey or Russia or India, we see that the political parties that are pulling this off are really popular. They command overwhelming support from the public. They do so when they win in the first place. They enter office with a broad coalition and a clear often a clear majority of the electorate. And they solidify that support in office. It's also worth noting that they are assisted often by undermining the institutions that attempt to check them, whether it's the media or the courts, so on, the kinds of things that Donald Trump is attempting. And that's not how this is playing out to this point. Donald Trump may be undertaking many measures that are reminiscent of those populist, right-wing, authoritarian governments. But the public's response is not conducive to that

taking hold in a way that permanently affects the trajectory of the United States without a large backlash, whether it's in the midterm or the next presidential election and so on. You're saying the American psyche has not fundamentally changed in the face of this and rallied behind it. The leaders in these countries you just mentioned, Hungary, Turkey, India, they don't do what they do in the face of public opposition. They do it because they know it is popular. That is not what we're seeing here. It's not what we're seeing from this poll. We're seeing that when it comes

to these excesses, actions that Trump is taking that resemble those of leaders in these other countries that Americans are saying, that's not what we want. That's right. Donald Trump, if he is trying to create a more authoritarian system of government in the United States, is running up against longstanding American values that are as old as the republic or even older. And that makes it much more difficult for him to get the public to acquiesce to broader claims of executive power than presidents have managed to claim for themselves in the past.

You know, in a strange way, and this is an extreme example, and there are obviously many differences, but in a strange way, it's almost the reverse of the challenges the US faced in Iraq. When the US invaded Iraq, there were lots of people who questioned whether the US could implant a democracy in a country without any history. We tried, liberal democracy. We tried, and it failed for a number of reasons besides the country not having a tradition of democratic governance. But if you were to try and implant an authoritarian regime in the United States, you face a sort

of similar version of the problem, but in reverse, where you're trying to get the citizens to go along with a form of government that it doesn't have experience with in the past and hasn't built a system of values around support. And again, that doesn't mean it's impossible. You can clearly point to cases historically where even liberal societies turn toward more authoritarian regimes, but that doesn't mean it's not more challenging as a consequence. And you can see that in the poll. Right. The poll does not in any way at the moment suggest that the country has a

big appetite for the most extreme dimensions of Trump's first 100 days. Which doesn't tell us, as you said, that those elements won't persist. It just tells you that the electorate has not changed in a way that suggests that they suddenly now want it. That's right. And that's also part of why I can't help but think that this was a bit of a missed political opportunity for conservatives and for for Donald Trump. You know, they didn't win the last election of landslide by any stretch, but they often won the debate over the issues fairly decisively on immigration. The public wanted a crackdown on immigration and secure border.

They wanted improve public safety. They wanted lower costs. There were a lot of opportunities here for the Trump administration to pursue a very conservative agenda that was consistent with the mandate that they had. And to the extent that they think that they are acting within their mandate over their first hundred days, I think that they have misread it and that they have taken it much farther than they argued for in the last election and that voters believed that they were voting for when they backed him last November. And the consequence of that has already done real damage to his presidency and if his conduct

continues it may continue to do even more damage over the remaining years of his term. Well, Nate. Thank you very much. We appreciate it. Michael, thank you for having me. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to another day. In its latest aggressive moves on immigration, the Trump administration has arrested a local

judge in Wisconsin for allegedly obstructing the detention of an undocumented immigrant and has deported a U.S. citizen to Honduras. The arrested judge is accused of steering the immigrant through a side door in her courtroom, while ICE agents waited to arrest him in a public hallway. The judge says she will fight the charges. Meanwhile, the deported U.S. citizen is a two-year-old who, according to a federal judge, may have been unconstitutionally deported against the wishes of her father. And Pope Francis was laid to rest over the weekend

in a solemn and majestic funeral held on the steps of St. Peter's Basilica in Rome. Hundreds of thousands of mourners, including presidents, prime ministers, and church cardinals, filled Vatican City for the ceremony, in which Francis was remembered as a voice for the voiceless across the world. Today's episode was produced by Caitlin O'Keefe, Astha Chathurvedi, and Stella Tan. It was edited by M.J. Davis-Lynn and Paige Coward, contains original music by Dan Powell, Marian Lozano, and Rowan Iemisto, and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansferk of Wonderly.

That's it for the daily. I'm Michael Bobauro. See you tomorrow.