Can Public Opinion Help Stop Donald Trump?

Even authoritarian regimes fear losing popular support. That’s why winning the battle for hearts and minds will be key to stopping the new Trump regime.

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” That’s the justifiable attitude that many on the American left have to this country’s sclerotic/anemic/antidemocratic “democratic institutions.”

In 2013, Bernie Sanders summed up the situation in our pseudo-democracy¹ this way: “Today, virtually no piece of legislation can get passed unless it has the OK from corporate America.” Study after study shows that this is true: even if a majority of the public supports a policy — Medicare for All, policies that would strengthen unions, raising the minimum wage, etc. — if the policy runs afoul of the interests of the capitalist class, it’s not going to go anywhere.

As we think about what force could grind the Trump administration’s blitzkrieg against our rights and the public sector to a halt, public opinion therefore looks like a poor candidate.

But turning majority support into a winning reform campaign is a far more complicated and difficult task than turning widespread and generalized opposition to a government into a brake on that government's actions. When governments lose the support of the people, their days of aggressive forward motion do in fact come to a close.

How could that be?

When a majority turns hard against a government, the government’s own party members begin to turn against it as well. It's clearly true that the vast majority of politicians are self-interested and eager to protect and advance their own careers. Politicians of the governing party have to worry about their reelection chances. When public opinion begins to go south, it’s those politicians most vulnerable to defeat who get cold feet first. But even politicians with more solid bases of support — who often tend to hold the leadership roles in a party — will get restless if the popular mood really turns negative.

A loss of popular support in turn erodes the reservoir of patience and support granted to leaders by party members. Aggressive and risky moves become harder and harder to take. Opportunities also open up in these situations for aspiring party heads. A leadership that is clearly flailing invites challenges from within its own ranks from politicians on the make who have an appetite for risk. These developments lead to tension and eventually open conflict inside the governing party.

A party whose popularity is sinking also risks losing market confidence. Investors look for stability and predictability. A government whose days seem numbered can offer neither. Uncertain about what comes next in the economy, markets sour and investment slows down. Economic troubles can also exacerbate popular discontent on their own and ratchet up the pressure on governments to retreat (as famously happened to the socialist François Mitterrand in France in the early 1980s and more recently happened to the Tories’ Liz Truss in Britain in 2022).

Finally, an unpopular government will find its room for maneuver within the state — in its interactions with bureaucrats and even military leaders — constrained. It was not a fluke that in June 2020, when Trump's popularity was at a low point and the Black Lives Matter movement raged in the streets, military leaders successfully resisted Trump’s attempts to deploy soldiers to crush the demonstrations. Had Trump’s government retained a much greater degree of popular support, it would have been much harder for the military to resist his calls.

There’s a reason why even authoritarian leaders fear public opinion and invest so much in trying to shape and control it. And why when they lose the public’s support their regimes collapse — often in spectacular fashion. Think of the Mubarak government in Egypt in 2011.

What’s needed now is a force that can “flood the zone” of the Trump administration, to use commentators’ favorite sports metaphor for describing the president’s new favorite tactic. Widespread, popular revulsion at the Trump regime could be that force. A government that retains the support of half of Americans, as Trump’s does today (but that’s changing), is far more dangerous than one whose support has fallen to 40, 30, or even 20 percent.

Assembling a popular majority against Trump and the Republican Party is the main task of the moment. Our tactics and mobilizations need to be judged in that light — do they get us closer to building a majority against this disaster?² That won’t be enough to move us on to the offense or to empower us to actually change this country for the better. But thwarting this government’s destructive agenda has to be the first step.

1. Acknowledging that the people do not, in fact, “rule” in the United States does not mean there’s nothing worth defending in the current order. Basic rights to criticize the government and organize openly to challenge it were taken for granted until recently but are now in the Trump administration’s crosshairs. These rights were won through struggle and now have to be defended.

2. In a recent statement by DSA’s Bread & Roses caucus against the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil that I helped write, we said: “How can we build this kind of opposition to Trump and to its attacks on our basic rights? We start with the tens of millions of people who are opposed to Trump and his regime. We can add to them the tens of millions of people who did not vote in 2024 and the millions more who voted for Trump reluctantly. These people belong to the mass base of people who abstained or voted for Trump as a protest against the administration of Joe Biden. They did not vote for what Trump is delivering now. That means that a real majority can be built against what is unfolding.”