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Los Angeles, California / USA - January 18, 2017: A White Trump supporter and and a young African American man argue during an immigration protest.
President Donald Trump is dividing America at a time when he could and should unite it, a conservative pollster and former Democratic politician argued on Tuesday.
“For decades Americans have told pollsters the country is going in the wrong direction,” pollster Mark Penn and New York City Democratic politician Andrew Stein wrote for The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday. “It started in the 1970s with Vietnam, carried over into the [President Jimmy] Carter years, and has been more or less constant since—except for periods beginning in the mid-1980s under [President] Ronald Reagan and the mid-1990s under [President] Bill Clinton. The public has been dissatisfied for the past 20 years. That means a whole generation came of age in an era of gloom and doom.”
Penn and Stein speculated that this helps explain why “in last year’s Harvard Youth poll, only 13 percent thought America was headed in the right direction (up 4 points from 2024) and 64 percent said democracy was in trouble.” By contrast, a Lazar poll of Israeli youth found “68 percent expressing pride in being Israeli and 79 percent satisfied with their life. This is a nation in which military service is near universal for both sexes and a state of war has been continuous for 2 and 1/2 years.”
Overall, Penn and Stein concluded that Trump should learn from Israel and other nations that emphasize a positive tone in their politics to simultaneously improve his own political standing and help Americans feel better about their future.
“This is an opportunity for President Trump,” Penn and Stein opined. “He can lead America out of this cycle of pessimism if he can focus on what makes America great and how we can become even greater. That requires follow-through in Iran, Venezuela and Cuba as linchpins to this recovery of spirit, along with the return of energy prices to normal and economic policies focused on growth and opportunity. The contrast between America and Israel suggests that happiness lies in a spirit that works to overcome adversity rather than complaining about the imperfections of success.”
They added, “The biggest challenge for Mr. Trump will be to set aside his political grievances and the most divisive parts of his message. If he can do that, the greatest legacy he can leave on America’s anniversary is restoring America’s optimism about its future and the next generation.”
Speaking to this journalist for Salon Magazine in 2018, former President Jimmy Carter said that “I think that under Trump the government is worse than it has been before. This is the first time I remember when the truth is ignored, allies are deliberately aggravated, China, Europe, Mexico and Canada are hurt economically and have to hurt us in response, Americans see the future worse than the present, and immigrants are treated cruelly.”
He later said that we continue to have the “crisis of confidence” he described in a 1979 speech, arguing that “we still have the same crises of that time, plus a serious loss of faith in democracy, the truth, treating all people as equals, each generation believing life would be better, America has a good system of justice, etc.”
Trump’s approval rating continues to fall in the polls as a result of various unpopular policies. A recent survey found that 20 percent of people who voted for Trump in 2024 have already decided not to support Republicans in the midterm elections, while almost 60 percent of voters who backed Trump in 2024 after supporting President Joe Biden in 2020 admitted they will not vote Republican in 2026.
“These working-class voters…took a gamble on Trump, hoping he would deliver them from an economic squeeze and restore some sense of social peace,” pollster Jared Abbott explained. “One year on, he has not done so, and worse than that, he’s introduced a lot more chaos.”