Trump May Be Losing His Touch

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

Donald Trump   and his tumult nearly 11 months in: He’s a rocket going not up but sideways or down. All polls say down. On Thursday AP-NORC reported his approval on the economy and immigration has “fallen substantially” since the spring, with 31% of Americans approving his handling of economic matters, down from 40% in March, and his approval on immigration at 38%, down from 49%. Recent Democratic sweeps in New Jersey and Virginia, and this week’s Miami mayoral race, make 2026 look distinctly blue-tinged.

In fairness, 11 months as president is long enough to get on everyone’s nerves—to disappoint your fans and infuriate your foes. But he’s in a fix, surrounded by mood shifts, challenges and bad signs.

His Capitol Hill base for once and famously began to kick away this summer, with loyalists breaking with him on the  Jeffrey Epstein  files and Georgia Rep.  Marjorie Taylor Greene  on other issues as well. She’s leaving Congress but not looking like someone who lost her battles with Mr. Trump. His problem: Once someone makes a successful jailbreak, all the other prisoners know a jailbreak is possible. This changes the conversation in the prison yard. Guards are eyed differently, the warden’s mystique is diminished.

Outside Washington Mr. Trump’s base is fighting with itself. America first is saying “I’m not MAGA.” Conspiracists all over: “Israel killed Charlie.” The assassination of   Charlie Kirk   looks increasingly like an epochal event. Did he understand how much he was holding together the Trumpian right? Without the force of his mediating presence they are cracking up.

Percolating below, unseen, is the price you pay in time for success. The president’s border triumph will likely weaken his and MAGA’s political position. He shut down illegal immigration on the southern border, which had been more or less open for decades. But it was anger at illegal immigration that kept his base cleaved to him and allied with each other. Remove the issue that made you, and you can no longer use it to gain votes or maintain unity.

This is the paradox of politics: Every time you solve a major problem, you’re removing a weapon from your political arsenal.

What happens when you lose your great issue? What happens when all that remains of that issue is its least popular aspect? Immigration remains in the news only because of brutal deportation practices. It isn’t “build the wall” anymore; it’s “Don’t arrest the poor guy working the line in a second job at the chicken-processing plant.” Americans don’t want that guy thrown out. The longer the deportations continue, the more unpopular and damaging to the administration they will become.

There is the matter of his mouth. The president’s supporters have for 10 years put up with his babyish obsession with insulting people. They think of it as the Trump Tax, the price you pay for getting someone bold and tough. But his hate-stoking now, in an era of political violence, is going to get someone hurt. In his Truth Social post Tuesday night he used criminal language about the press—news outlets and reporters are “seditious, perhaps even treasonous,” They “libel and demean THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.” They are “true Enemies of the people, and we should do something about it.” Like what?

It isn’t 2015, we’re more on edge. In a darker time, he’s going to find in the polls fewer people willing to pay the Trump Tax.

Obviously inflation is the so-far-immovable thing, and he’s bungled his response—“affordability” is a Democratic “hoax”, a “scam,” a mere political talking point.

He sounded like   Lyndon B. Johnson, who late in his second term was reported to have said, when the public started turning on the effects of his economic policies, “You’ve never had it so good!” That’s the sound of true presidential detachment:   I work so hard, you’re a bunch of spoiled babies. . House Minority Leader   Gerald Ford   beat Johnson around the head for that at a 1967 Lincoln Day dinner: “I cannot conceive of a Lincoln telling the people ‘You never had it so good,’ when consumer prices are soaring, the workingman’s real spendable earnings are slipping, and the farmer’s parity ratio is falling hard and fast.”

People on the ground feel tremors presidents can’t feel. They see Mr. Trump flying around the world on his missions and tearing up the White House East Wing to build a ballroom. All that feels like what presidents do when things are going well, in a boom everyone is experiencing. People don’t feel that way now.

It isn’t only inflation spreading unease. Artificial intelligence is coming. It’s going to change the entire employment picture in America over the next few years. It’s going to eat jobs, and people with imagination—and America is nothing if not imaginative—can see it coming. This is part of the background music in America: Americans who   aren’t   unemployed and   do   have a house are afraid that in the next few years they could lose their job, their security. And they’re worried about their kids.

A woman in a service industry, an immigrant to America from Eastern Europe who’s been here about 20 years, took me aside recently. Her eldest child, a senior in high school, is looking around at local colleges. She was worried about AI and asked for advice on what her son might study so that in four years he could get a job. We asked ChatGPT, which advised “embodied in-person work” such as heating and air conditioning technician, pool cleaner. She wasn’t happy with that. She’d worked herself to the bone to get her son higher in the world than she is. She wants him to own the pool.

That is how Americans think: rise. They want to know their government is   thinking about   AI. They want a sense that someone in charge sees the big picture. They want to hear there’s a plan. Mr. Trump sees the development of AI simply as a matter of competition with China and of economic growth, which is dependent right now on AI.

He shows no sign of seeing any dark side to it, has no apparent plans to regulate it, and is beating back state attempts to impose limits. He’s given his friends the AI “broligarchs,” in   Ed Luce’s term in the Financial Times, “carte blanche.”

What happened the last time   Mark Zuckerberg   had carte blanche? Haven’t we read about all the billionaires powering AI who have safe houses and bunkers to which to flee if and when the world they’re inventing goes under?

Mr. Trump seems alive to none of this, but regular people are, and this has more to do with our economic unease than we credit.

Those around the president believe the next big moment for him comes in January, with the State of the Union address, when he can reset the table with a great speech.

Maybe. Those addresses don’t have the power they once had but still retain some. He might focus on things people are really thinking about—AI, inflation and how Americans in their 30s and 40s can get it together to buy a house and have a baby and keep this whole lumbering thing called America going.