One of the ongoing elements of coverage of the Trump administration that drives me more than a little crazy is the constant parsing of whether he is “strong” or “weak.” This is usually in the context of public opinion and, therefore, about electoral strength. While his popularity matters and I do continue to think that the Republicans are going to suffer at the polls next November,* these are all about future weakness and the possible consequences thereof. This is part of the general problem of the horseracification of political analysis. Who’s up? Who’s down? What’s the word of the moment?
This TNR headline is a great example of what I am talking about: Trump Is a Weak, Failing President, and the Media Is Finally Saying So. I should have been keeping a running tally of such stories and could do the research to provide examples, but if you are reading this, you read enough political news to know what I am talking about.
I am not saying that all of that doesn’t matter; I think it does. It would matter, for example, if Trump were popular. Popularity would help him consolidate his authoritarianism. If people were happy, electoral outcomes would be different, etc. As such, I am not utterly opposed to such analysis.
But.
BUT.
But it has precious little to do with the power that Trump and his administration currently hold.
Trump, like all presidents, serves a fixed, four-year term. His popularity rating, while a relevant predictor of future electoral outcomes, has precious little to do with his power, especially if the Congress and the Supreme Court are largely compliant (if not utterly supine). It should be further noted that even if the Democrats win power in the House and/or the Senate, they can make life more difficult for Trump, but their ability to force him to do anything would be nonexistent, and their power to fix any of what I discuss below would be zero.
A simple example: Trump’s poll numbers and long-term electoral prospects are irrelevant to ICE’s ability to harass, detain, and even deport people to hellish conditions.
Nor do popularity ratings stop him and his cronies from utterly upsetting the international order in ways that are likely irreparable. Europe and our other allies will not be able to trust us as the global leaders we were after electing Trump twice. They can’t gamble their futures on a US electorate that might do something similar again. This is going to have profound long-term effects on trade, diplomatic relations, and military alliances. Trump may be “weak” and “failing” in terms of public opinion and electoral calculations, but he still has the power to do substantial long-term damage, and he isn’t even finished with his first full year in office.
To move to a specific choice: the gutting of USAID was not linked, one way or the other, to popularity. It just happened, and people are dying as a result. Here is an example from ProPublica: Trump Officials Celebrated With Cake After Slashing Aid. Then People Died of Cholera. See also, NPR: Study: 14 million lives could be lost due to Trump aid cuts.
You know, just some pesky details.
In terms of domestic politics, Trump’s unleashing of white nationalism and a deeply racist America First mentality is not going to be put back in the bottle any time soon.
Another key example is public health. Trump’s appointment of Robert Kennedy, Jr., to be Secretary of Health and Human Services is going to have profound long-term effects on American citizens. Trump has been helping increase vaccine skepticism as a general matter, but empowering Kennedy has accelerated that notion beyond belief. For example, the NYT reports: R.F.K. Jr. Likely to Swap U.S. Childhood Vaccine Schedule for Denmark’s.
Granted, Europe does a pretty good job with public health, so maybe that’s a good thing?
Well…
But emboldened by a directive from President Trump, Mr. Kennedy is now poised to make a seismic shift. He is expected to announce in the new year that American children should be immunized according to a different schedule with fewer vaccines, used by the much smaller, largely homogenous country of Denmark.
A wholesale revision of the schedule would bypass the evidence-based, committee-led process that has underpinned vaccine recommendations in the country for decades, and could affect whether private insurance and government assistance programs will cover the shots.
And many medical experts worry that losing strong endorsements of some vaccines will create financial and logistical hurdles to obtaining them, further erode Americans’ confidence in immunizations and increase the chances of disease outbreaks. Measles and whooping cough are already resurgent in multiple states because of dropping vaccination rates.
[…]
“They’re going to bring back suffering and death,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, chair of the infectious disease committee for the American Academy of Pediatrics. “I don’t say that with any hyperbole, that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
That doesn’t sound good. But I bet the Danes are proud to share!
With one or two exceptions, the schedule in the United States is nearly identical to those of Canada, Britain, Australia and Germany. Japan omits some vaccines in the American schedule but includes others, like a shot against Japanese encephalitis, that are not routinely administered in the United States.
On the contrary, they said, it is Denmark, a country with a population the size of Wisconsin’s and universal health care, that is the outlier among richer nations.
The United States currently recommends immunizing all children against 17 diseases. Adopting Denmark’s schedule would skip shots against seven of these: respiratory syncytial virus — the leading cause of infant hospitalizations in the United States — influenza, rotavirus, chickenpox, meningitis, hepatitis A and hepatitis B.
Health officials in Denmark and Germany said they were baffled by the Trump administration’s push to emulate their countries. Traditionally, they have looked to the United States as a leader for its meticulous process of review and recommendation of vaccinations.
The officials noted that the childhood vaccination schedule in the United States had been tailored for the country’s large and diverse population and patchy system of medical care. Denmark and Germany have comprehensive free prenatal care and an infant mortality rate that is about half of that in the United States.
“It’s not at all fair to say look at Denmark unless you can match the other characteristics of Denmark,” said Anders Hviid, who leads research on vaccine safety and effectiveness at the Statens Serum Institut, Denmark’s equivalent of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
I recommend the entire article. Not only is it highly concerning that the RFK HHS is seeking to turn the clock back to my youth, when kids regularly contracted these very serious diseases, some of whom died as a result, but he is sowing the seeds of distrust of medical science in a way that will continue to damage public health for at least a generation.
Just like our allies have to be wary of US leadership going into the future, things like being told “the CDC recommends” already do not have the same power that they once had. Note that I am not saying the CDC was perfect. But quite clearly, a “CDC recommendation” meant a lot more before Bobby was allowed to put his cranks and quacks in charge. Further, the politicization of all of this means that for years to come, people will filter what they hear and follow based not on whether the science is good or not, but on which party they trust. This is bad for all of us.
All of this means that it is difficult for me to accept assessments of Trump’s weakness and failures. He is instituting serious, long-term change to domestic and international politics that will either be permanent or very difficult to reverse. In that sense, he is powerful and successful. As I noted in a recent post, he is shaping up to be one of our most consequential presidents. We usually assign that mantle to people who expand the rights of Americans, build new policy regimes, or truly enhance American greatness. But in this case, the consequences are division, damage, death, and long-term loss of American power.
And I still think he is in the process of transforming the presidency (with the aid and abetting of SCOTUS) to make the presidency into an electoral dictator, where the next occupant will just spend a lot of time issuing EOs to overturn what has been done, and then trying to use the same power routes to do what they want done. And then every four-to-eight years, rinse, wash, repeat.
All of this is happening even with the real possibility that Trump will leave office as one of the most unpopular presidents of all time.
At a minimum, this post is a reminder of the difference between power and popularity as metrics of “failure” and also a note that one of the major flaws of American political journalism is the propensity to horseracify everything.
*I know there is understandable anxiety about possible electoral interference in 2026. I remain concerned, but apart from the Gerrymandering Wars, the administration has largely seemed disinterested in trying to get involved in elections. Maybe it is all a feint, and they are going to really try to affect outcomes. If one wants to really affect outcomes, some practice in the off, off-year elections and special elections would have been warranted, I would think. The admin seemed utterly disinterested in all of it. Trump’s weird warm embrace of Mamdani looked more like resignation to reality than a plan to manipulate outcomes. Again, we shall see.
