In yet another “How could this be?” moment for liberals and Never Trumpers of all stripes, we’re now seeing polls on the president-elect’s transition, and he’s getting, you guessed it, pretty good marks. When asked by Pew recently whether they approve of the policies and plans for the future authored by the man who wanted Matt Gaetz to run the Justice Department and still wants a Putin fan-girl to be in charge of U.S. intelligence and a former congressman who pushed the idea that vaccines cause autism to lead the Centers for Disease Control, 53 percent of respondents said they do, while 46 percent said they disapprove.
More: Pew asked the same respondents whether they have warm or cool feelings toward Trump. “Cold” and “very cold” still combined to top “warm” and “very warm,” 47 to 42 percent, but his warm rating today is considerably higher than it was in 2016 or 2020.
This means one obvious thing: The independent voters whom the exit polls say he narrowly lost to Kamala Harris (49–46, says CNN) have decided to give him a chance.
And that, in turn, means something else. Our efforts to paint Trump as a sui generis extremist failed. All those warnings about the unique danger he poses to this country, so obviously true and dire to us, didn’t really register with swing voters. Or maybe they registered to some extent, given how close the election was. But they didn’t prove to be decisive. These voters see Trump as rude and crude, maybe, but they weigh his words and promises in pretty much the same way they weigh any other politician’s; Trump does not, for these people, sit outside American political tradition at all.
And this has implications for the resistance to Trump 2.0. It will have to take an entirely different approach this time around.
I’ll get to that, but first, an admission: I confess I’ve been mystified by this lack of alarm. I’ve said and written many times that I understand MAGA true believers better than I understand these swing voters. MAGA true believers at least recognize that Trump is unlike anyone else who has come down the pike in American politics in our lifetimes. This is one thing those of us who revile Trump have in common with those who adore him: We all understand that he’s unique.
It’s the people who don’t see him as unique who have baffled me. I just haven’t understood how that’s possible. My best guesses are as follows. One, they’re more cynical than the average voter and they think every politician is a corrupt liar, so Trump doesn’t particularly stand out to them in either regard. Two, they just don’t care about politics very much—we always need to remember that there are a few million voters out there who pay attention to politics the way I pay attention to gymnastics; that is, for about a month every four years. Three, they either sort of like him personally or at least they like the fact that he’s a “successful” businessman. Yes, narrow majorities have always thought of Trump this way, and one Biden official once told me that the view was just impossible to dislodge.
Whatever the reason, there we have it. Their hair is not on fire about RFK Jr. They may have thought Gaetz was an odd choice, but they’re totally on board with Pam Bondi, who is clearly qualified on paper. People like us read The Washington Post’s report Sunday that she’s going to move to prosecute Trump’s prosecutors, and we have convulsions. Don’t misunderstand me—we’re right to. Bondi was an election denier and is a complete loyalist, and while we can hope that her years in the law have instilled in her some modicum of respect for the need for evidence, her political history gives us ample reason to suspect that she’ll carry out Trump’s revenge agenda.
But it’s also apparently the case that swing voters don’t care, at least not yet. And no amount of screaming on our part is going to make them care. We don’t need outrage this time around. We don’t need marches. We need facts. We need evidence. We need smart and aggressive lawyers who have the funds at their disposal to do what they need to do. We need Democrats who aren’t afraid and will repeat the facts and the evidence relentlessly, daily, hourly. And in the face of a right-wing media machine that, come 12:01 p.m. on January 20, will start pronouncing on how great everything in America suddenly is, we need mainstream journalism that will do the same.
Trump entered office in 2017 with a 45 percent approval rating. In four years, he never once topped 50 percent, according to Gallup. We should be prepared for him to start at 50 this time around.
If we’re right about Trump, he’ll start going down pretty fast. If a 60 percent tariff on Chinese goods turns that $300 tablet into a $420 one, if it raises prices on groceries and toys and clothes and refrigerators, people will notice. If he really does use the justice system for retribution, they’ll notice that too. If he frees the January 6 “hostages,” he’ll pay a price. If he hands a chunk of Ukraine to the Kremlin and weakens NATO and aligns the United States of America with people like Putin and Orbán, even those one-month-every-four-years voters will disapprove. If he has a political opponent arrested on spurious grounds, people will see through it. And if he starts rounding up fathers and mothers living in their communities in peace, I hope and suspect that many who’ve been telling pollsters they’d support Trump’s mass deportation plans would change their minds.
We needn’t lose our conviction that Trump is a dangerous extremist. That conviction is correct and will be proven so. But it will have to be proven through a democratic process: smart opposition, a vigorous press, persuasion of our fellow citizens. The person most likely to discredit Trump is Trump himself.
