How Trump’s MAGA instincts are getting checked by moderate voters

A new report in Newsweek says that although President Donald Trump has changed America in many ways, moderate Americans who the president has targeted in the past, are now changing Trump.

"In a year obsessed with fracture, the Epstein Files Transparency Act produced legislative agreement: a left-right coalition large enough to end a monthslong stall. The bill moved after a discharge petition — one of Congress’s bluntest tools — forced the vote," they write.

But that rare political agreement and alignment wasn't the only interesting development to emerge in this highly divided partisan climate, they note.

"Trump did remake American politics — on trade, on the border, on the judiciary — but the country’s broad middle is now remaking his administration back," they write.

This has been evident in several ways, Newsweek explains, including "near-unanimous votes to take down AI deepfakes; lopsided margins to harden fentanyl rules; a Supreme Court that still says "9–0” on many cases; a TikTok policy that drifted from ban-it-tomorrow theatrics to a divest-or-comply framework because millions use the app."

Changes are notable, they write, even with some of the most vocal politicians.

"Even the loudest politician of his era keeps adjusting to where the voters already are. The death of moderate America has been greatly exaggerated," they write.

The "people who are running the American government are telling the same bleak story," they write, noting that everyone is preoccupied by the notion that "America is polarized almost beyond repair."

But the evidence proves otherwise, they say.

"Wherever you look, American institutions keep producing broad, cross-party coalitions on concrete things — and in ways that keep nudging Trump, of all politicians, toward the center of public opinion he helped to redefine," they write.

The 427-1 House vote to force the release of the Epstein files is the best example, they say, and "the Senate’s unanimous consent is likewise not a fluke."

None of it, they say, is a one-off, noting that "there’s Trump himself — the man whose disruption turned blunt populism into the lingua franca of American politics — being tugged back, sometimes, to the median voter he once delighted in offending," as seen in his defense of In Vitro Fertilization (IVF), a decision that "put him to the left of many social conservatives and squarely with the public."

Trump's recent public musings on his dubious admission into heaven, they write, has also put him somewhere in the middle.

"Americans want their leaders, whoever they are, to make some peace with the moral majority, which now includes a lot of suburban women who like IVF and a lot of digital natives who like TikTok," they write.

Despite Trump's base raging at culture wars, the middle, they write, has been subtly moving Trump their way.

"Consensus has been working, quietly, around the edges of the culture war all year: protecting victims of AI exploitation; curbing synthetic opioids; trimming centuries-long war powers; keeping aircraft separated over the Potomac; nudging the most polarizing politician of the age into mainstream positions, on some issues at least," Newsweek explains.

"The pundit’s tale of two Americas will not die, and it shouldn’t; there are real divides. But moderate America — the one that has a deeply held intuition that victims deserve help and the public deserves the truth — keeps showing up," they add.