Trump and MAGA Are Down But Not Out
Overestimating the strength of an opponent is as risky as underestimating one. The political moment is changing. Anti-MAGA forces of the left and center now have to move from defense to offense.
Until one month ago, it seemed clear that Donald Trump and his MAGA supporters were on the ascent. They were remaking global politics with a new tariff regime and a bellicose, rechristened Department of War. At home, they carried out another great upward redistribution of wealth — the fifth redistribution of the neoliberal era, following Ronald Reagan’s in 1981, George W. Bush’s in 2001 and 2003, and Trump’s own in 2017. They unleashed Immigration and Customs Enforcement and a wave of repression and threats to cow their critics and opponents in social movements, academia, and even the corporate world.
But Trump and MAGA seem dangerously close to losing the briefly held Mandate of Heaven. Are we entering a new political moment? A few data points are suggestive.
The much remarked upon off-year elections in New Jersey, Virginia, and a smattering of local races saw Democrats far outperform Kamala Harris’s poor showing last year. In New York City, Zohran Mamdani’s campaign organized a massive upsurge in turnout. While Mamdani won just over half of the city’s voters, the election marks a significant change from voting patterns in 2024, which brought big shifts toward Trump in the city and signaled potential trouble ahead for the Democratic Party. Fast-forward a year, and the Republican candidate for mayor, Curtis Sliwa, was keeping Trump at arm’s length and couldn’t crack 10 percentage points in the final vote.
Trump’s own administration seems to know something has changed. The White House is trying to recalibrate its message and is floating the idea of sending most Americans a $2,000 check next year. Maybe a bribe can buy MAGA more time.
Polling numbers tell a slightly different story, but if anything it’s one even less favorable to the right wing. The big turn against MAGA came much earlier this year. The common sense about Trump’s strength has just been slow to adjust.
For example, after a brief and partial recovery in the public’s level of pessimism about the country’s future in January, the percentage of those saying they think the United States is on the wrong track is growing again (see chart one below; in all the charts more positive numbers reflect better news for Trump and the GOP, more negative numbers bad news). Trump’s approval rating headed south from day one, wasting away a brief honeymoon and suffering its steepest decline in the spring. A short-lived revival in support followed in May and early June after the shock of the tariffs wore off, but it ceased by the start of the summer and it’s been downhill since. Polling from the last three weeks suggest that there’s another wave of defectors from Team MAGA taking shape (chart two). Congressional Republicans still have greater public support than Democrats (chart three) — a mark of justified public disgust at the Democrats’ (mis)leadership class — but that edge is sliding. And when pressed to say who they’ll vote for, more Americans have preferred Democrats since the spring (chart four).1
Polling never tells the full story about the power of an administration. But it’s an important measure, and as I’ve argued before, a big swing against Trump in popular opinion would be a powerful check on his regime.
What gives? Some possible explanations for the change in circumstances:
The withholding of funds from food stamps during the shutdown did especially significant damage to Trump (see a good analysis of this here). More than 40 million people, about one in eight Americans, depend on food stamps to eat. Many of them are from struggling working-class families who Trump and the GOP hoped to integrate into their camp. Millions now also face a sharp increase in their health insurance premiums or will be kicked off Medicaid due to the One Big Beautiful Bill. That will bring the White House more grief in the months to come.
The No Kings mobilizations on October 18 brought out between five and six million people — by one count the largest mass political mobilization in US history. That has given renewed vigor to the opposition to Trump, and the sight of thousands of protesters in small towns and mid-sized cities all across the country probably had an effect.
Internal divisions among the Republican’s natural base do the administration no favors. The first six months were marked by a remarkable degree of Republican political unity. But Elon Musk’s predictable falling out with the president was a sign of things to come. Trump’s tariffs are being challenged by groups who would otherwise be his natural allies: many small businesses and the Chamber of Commerce. A small but hardy group of Republican congressmembers, including Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene, have become vocal critics of the Trump administration’s support for the genocide in Gaza, and they seem to represent a considerable minority of GOP voters. And new revelations in just the last few days about Trump’s long-standing friendship with Jeffrey Epstein could jeopardize the unquestioning loyalty granted to him by more figures in the Republican establishment.
This is what a changing political moment feels like, even if it’s too soon to say Trump is in retreat. But a full shift to more favorable political terrain will require a change in the tactics of the anti-MAGA forces of the center and left as well. Until that comes about, MAGA will be down but not out.
Flipping to offense depends most importantly on new leadership. Blame for the absence of a real organized opposition to Trump and MAGA belongs to Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries. The pathetic eleventh hour surrender on the shutdown by a gaggle of Senate Democrats in return for a couple hollow promises is at least partly Schumer’s doing. Every botched press conference, low-energy denunciation, and sternly worded letter to the White House by Schumer and Jeffries this year reinforces the understanding that they’re not fit to lead the opposition to Trump’s GOP.
As Sanders himself pointed out, it is not realistic to think that progressives could take the leadership of the opposition to MAGA in Congress given the balance of forces in the Democratic caucus. The party is still dominated in DC by centrists who seem to fear the left as much as they fear Trump. But Bernie and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, joined by a new Mayor Zohran Mamdani, could provide a different kind of leadership for the opposition.2 Their Fighting Oligarchy tour was a promising start and showed that there’s a hunger out there for new leaders. Could they now put together a platform for the elections in 2026? A left-wing version of the famous Contract with America in 1994. Could they build a national slate of progressive and left Democratic primary challengers and, potentially, independent populists running in red states and districts?
The danger of overestimating Trump and MAGA at this point is that some of these questions won’t get posed. So long as the anti-MAGA forces are on defense, the instinct to crouch and be cautious (or roll over and play dead) is strong. And the space to run on a positive program (even a cheerful program, as Meagan Day put it in a great recent piece) seems limited. But if the cracks are opening up in the MAGA coalition, then a new political push is possible. My Age of Trump–induced pessimism makes it hard for me to believe that could be true — and I’m sure that’s the case for many others. But moments change, and the task of a political opposition is to hasten that shift and make the most of it.
Data for right track/wrong track and assessment of Republicans and Democrats in Congress taken from YouGov polls. Data for presidential approval taken from Silver Bulletin averages. Data for generic congressional ballot preference taken from Votehub.
It would be great to add unions to this list of potential leaders of a new opposition. But as Eric Blanc points out, organized labor deserves its share of criticism for the abrupt shutdown surrender. Labor leaders have also been MIA to date in the opposition to Trump. Some inspiring local efforts to support anti-Trump mobilizations notwithstanding, there’s been a dearth of labor leadership nationally. That has deeper causes. After what seemed like a promising go at a new upsurge by labor in the last two years of the Biden administration, the movement now seems to be stuck in neutral. It would be worth thinking about why. Some factors that have to be accounted for: The treachery of Teamsters president Sean O’Brien, who pivoted from leading a reform movement in one of the country’s major unions to aligning himself with MAGA. Uncertainty in the United Auto Workers, where the ambitious goals for a sweeping new organizing campaign in auto factories set by the reform leadership around Shawn Fain has been at least temporarily turned back (and the UAW did itself no favors with its semi-support for Trump’s new tariff regime). And of course, as the far right has taken control of interpreting and enforcing labor law, it has created an existential threat to the public sector unionized workforce and new organizing at Amazon and Starbucks.
There’s a change in the weather as the song goes 😎