{"id":122807,"date":"2026-02-04T17:23:09","date_gmt":"2026-02-04T17:23:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/122807\/"},"modified":"2026-02-04T17:23:09","modified_gmt":"2026-02-04T17:23:09","slug":"opinion-trump-has-lost-the-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/122807\/","title":{"rendered":"Opinion | \u2018Trump Has Lost the Country\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"css-8hvvyd\">I want to tell you a secret. One that most conservatives on the internet don\u2019t want you to know. A year into his second presidency, Donald Trump has lost the country. \u201cThe majority of voters believe the country is worse off today than it was a year ago.\u201d \u201cApproval rating at 37 percent, the lowest of his second term.\u201d \u201cA failure. Fail, fail, fail.\u201d And the grand coalition that he united to defeat Kamala Harris has evaporated. And all of this was predictable. From the first days of DOGE through the debacle in Minneapolis, the Trump administration has consistently governed as if swing voters aren\u2019t part of its coalition. And now, guess what? They\u2019re not. \u201cRepublicans faced a major loss over the weekend, when Democrats were able to flip a reliably red State Senate seat.\u201d \u201cThat\u2019s an over 30-point shift to the left. You ignore this, you\u2019re going to ice yourself out of a majority come the midterm.\u201d But here\u2019s the thing. It isn\u2019t moderates and swing voters who lose out when the Trump administration becomes unpopular. It\u2019s people on the right. People like me, and certainly people further to my right who support many of the things the Trump administration has tried to do, from securing the border to pressuring American institutions to become more ideologically diverse, to resetting and rolling back D.E.I. All of that, all of that agenda will just disappear if the Republican Party can\u2019t win elections. And it will disappear especially rapidly because it\u2019s an agenda that has been pushed primarily through executive power, without congressional buy-in and support. In the long run, you just can\u2019t have a transformative agenda, large or small, if you don\u2019t keep moderates and the general public on your side. Now, that may sound like an obvious point, but in fact, both left and right treat it like a grand secret or a reality that they\u2019re interested in denying or suppressing. Throughout the Biden era, I had to listen to liberals tell me that actually Joe Biden was a popular president, very successful, maybe misunderstood only because of right-wing disinformation efforts. \u201cHe is vigorous. He is mentally acute.\u201d \u201cAnd I\u2019m telling you, this guy is tough. He\u2019s smart, he\u2019s on his game.\u201d \u201cAnd over the last four years, he\u2019s been showing up for the American people.\u201d When the reality was that Biden had governed to the left of the country, things had gone badly and his coalition had cracked up. Simple as that. Now the same thing is happening on the right. If you listen to the influencers who sit at the heart of right-wing politics right now, they\u2019ll either tell you that Trump is a great success \u2014\u2014 \u201cI don\u2019t think anyone understands optics better than the president of the United States. I think that he is legitimately the best in the business.\u201d \u2014\u2014 or they\u2019ll say the only problem is that Trump hasn\u2019t been aggressive and revolutionary enough. \u201cThey need to escalate the fight against illegal migrants in a strategic and sensible way. We need them to get out of the country.\u201d There\u2019s no one to point out the bleeding obvious: that the Trump administration is failing because it is making many millions of normal Americans feel totally freaked out. \u201cI regret voting for Donald Trump.\u201d \u201cSo I work on my family\u2019s farm, and we\u2019ve lost our best hands because of Trump\u2019s deportations.\u201d And the conservatives who are willing to say that are the kind of people who are easy for parts of the right to dismiss. New York Times conservatives. Trump skeptics rather than true believers. But damn it, I\u2019m right. I was right when I warned liberals in the Biden era that they were losing the country and enabling Donald Trump\u2019s return. And I\u2019m right when I tell conservatives and populists the truth that they don\u2019t hear enough of on right-wing media: that unless the administration finds a way to seem a little bit more moderate and just a little bit more normal, there isn\u2019t going to be any Trump legacy at all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I want to tell you a secret. One that most conservatives on the internet don\u2019t want you to&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":122808,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[11078,53701,35290,153,9,24,55,54,56],"class_list":["post-122807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-abortion","tag-catholic-university-of-america","tag-conservatism-in-the-united-states","tag-donald-trump","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122807\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/122808"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}