MAGA 'losing patience' as Trump voters increasingly report 'buyer’s remorse'

16 February

A Trump supporter sporting a red ‘Keep America Great’ hat at a rally in Des Moines, Iowa. Aspects and Angles / Shutterstock

Donald Trump's "constant controversy and chaos" is doing real damage to the U.S. and the world, even when he backs down, according to a Monday analysis from Politico, with his hectic leadership now further running the risk of sending his once-loyal GOP voters running for the hills.

Throughout the report, Politico broke down Trump's second-term tendency to promote wild and incendiary ideas or policy proposals, often in the form of social media posts. Many of his more destructive or controversial ideas have prompted enough backlash — be it from lawmakers, voters or the business world — that he has reversed course on them, but according to Politico's analysis, these failed ideas are still doing real harm.

The consistent trend of proclaiming and swiftly backtracking on ideas is also reminding a lot of voters of the worst days from Trump's first term. Whit Ayres, a Republican pollster, suggested that Trump was repeating the tumult that turned off so many voters back then, costing the GOP the House in 2018 and himself reelection in 2020. He noted that with the president's approval at around 40 percent, his party risks losing around 32 House seats in the coming midterms. It also does not bode well for the party retaining the White House in 2028.

“There’s a sense that this is a pretty chaotic administration and seems to remind people of the pandemic period in the first term,“ Ayres explained. "Joe Biden’s fundamental message in 2020 was to restore normalcy, and that seemed to be persuasive to enough people to get him elected.”

In another report from Monday, The Daily Beast highlighted several posts from regretful Trump voters, showing an increasing trend of "buyer's remorse" among his 2024 base.

"Losing patience [with] Trump... Promised to bring back manufacturing… -100k jobs. Hamas didn’t disarm… that’s coming back," a user on Reddit wrote in a post from over the weekend. "His red line in Iran got thousands killed for no reason. The right has lost immigration as an issue. Tariffs suck. Killed off US-created world order. I could go on."

"My entire timeline right now is just regretful Trump voters. Interesting," Spencer Hakimian, a hedge fund manager and political commentator, wrote in a post to X.

Trump's high-profile reversals are numerous as his second year back unfolds. One of the most prominent in recent weeks was the pullback of federal immigration forces from Minnesota's Twin Cities region after weeks of a massive deportation operation. While the administration consistently claimed that the operation was only targeting criminal undocumented immigrants, the surge ultimately played out as a campaign of terror and harassment against the community, with many non-white legal residents caught in the crosshairs and two American citizens gunned down by federal agents. The impact of the operation has been widely credited with tanking Trump's approval on immigration issues.

Elsewhere, Trump also backed away from his forceful assertions that the U.S. should annex Greenland from Denmark, claiming that a new deal had resolved the matter, though few details about it have yet surfaced. Trump also raised alarm in the financial sector with his declaration that all credit card interest ought to be capped at 10 percent, an idea he ultimately backed away from and passed the responsibility for to Congress. This latter reversal, Politico noted, showed the often outsized impact of Trump's reversals on the realm of finance.

“Even proposals that don’t ultimately move forward have consequences,” one anonymous financial industry insider told the outlet. “Markets react. Issuers reassess risk. When policymakers float price controls, it creates uncertainty that can translate into tighter underwriting and reduced access — particularly for higher-risk or lower-income consumers.”

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