NYT piece indicts Trump's expanding wave of policy failures

In 2024, one of the Trump campaign's most effective lines of attack against Democratic nominee Kamala Harris was, "Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you." The argument was that while Democrats were obsessed with language policing and pronouns, Donald Trump was focused on real issues like inflation, jobs and the high cost of living. And that messaging worked, enabling Trump to pull off a narrow victory.

But 18 months into his second presidency, Trump is suffering from weak approval ratings in poll after poll. Political scientists, interviewed by The New York Times' Thomas Edsall, laid out some of the many reasons for Trump's unpopularity.

Trump's "kiss of death," Edsall argues in a Tuesday column for the Times, ranges from "job losses" and his "imposition of tariffs" to a "record surge in the national debt" and "the economic havoc resulting from his war against Iran."

Matthew Dallek, who teaches political history at George Washington University in Washington, DC, told Edsall, "Governing via conspiracy theories, personal whim and wish-casting, Trump has taken his place as the most consistently inept president of this century. At home and abroad, in many Cabinet and sub-Cabinet agencies, the administration's culture is dominated by incompetence."

Michael Bailey, a political science professor at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, cites Trump's refusal to listen to expert advice as a major flaw of his second presidency.

Bailey told Edsall, "Many presidents have made mistakes, but none have made mistakes so cavalierly as President Trump. He makes rash, reckless decisions; at best, they are based on barstool theories of how the world works — and at worst, they are driven by corrupt motives. Since he 'just knows' he is right about how tariffs work, no evidence will sway him. In the short term, the country has been, in many ways, resilient. But he is corroding state capacity, democratic norms and the very sense of a unified nation."

But while Bailey is highly critical of Trump from a policy standpoint, believes that the president is "quite skilled as a political leader" and notes his "hold on the Republican primary electorate."

Donald Moynihan, who teaches public policy at the University of Michigan, told Edsall, "There are three categories of Trump failures: disasters of mismanagement, disasters by design and disasters of greed. What are the achievements of the second Trump presidency thus far? Persistent inflation, sluggish economic growth, an unpopular war, aggressive immigration enforcement that has outraged many and the shredding of the safety net to fund a large tax cut…. Trump no longer feels the need to be bound by precedent, norms or good advice."

Rottinghaus told Edsall, "What's different about Trump is that many of his supporters evaluate him less by traditional policy outcomes and more by whether he's fighting the political and cultural battles they care about. In today's polarized environment, political identity often outweighs measurable policy success or failure…. What distinguishes Trump is his willingness to pursue high-risk, high-visibility policies with relatively little concern for expert consensus or institutional caution. That increases both the potential payoff and the potential for costly failures."