U.S. President Donald Trump dances at a rally to kick off the Great American State Fair in celebration of the 250th anniversary of U.S. independence on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 24, 2026.
According to conservative Washington Post contributor Ramesh Ponnuru, while President Donald Trump entered office aiming to “break the system,” that hasn’t panned out. Instead, writes Ponnuru, “the system is breaking him.”
Trump has received a barrage of bad news lately, explains Ponnuru. His approval rating is historically low, as “voters disapprove of his performance on issue after issue, from the economy to immigration to Iran.” His party is projected to lose the majority in the House, and it now appears vulnerable in the Senate.
While Trump has repeatedly tried to wage lawfare against his enemies, most of his attempted prosecutions have been “laughed out of court.” He’s had to retreat from his “shock-and-awe” deportation approach in liberal cities, and on his almost universally decried “slush fund” for J6ers. His “hairbrained scheme” to enact election laws in his favor has been rebuffed by an unwilling Congress. Inflation is hammering the economy, the war with Iran turned out to be a humiliating loss and “even an initiative as modest as the cleaning of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool has become a debacle.”
For the chief executive and his supporters, writes Ponnuru, “It’s all a big comedown from the first year of this presidential term, when Trump seemed to be bulldozing his critics: using the U.S. DOGE Service to slash the federal government, getting almost all of his Cabinet nominees confirmed, winning concessions from law schools and universities, using unilateral tariffs to restructure global commerce.”
But according to Ponnuru, Trump’s failures haven’t come due to the effective opposition of his opponents, but through a combination of “presidential hubris” and the system’s checks and balances.
“Trump acted as though voters chose him in 2024 because they loved everything about him, rather than because they hated inflation,” Ponnuru explains. “Since winning, he has taken a few steps that place upward pressure on prices — warring with Iran, imposing tariffs, trying to push interest rates down by intimidating the Federal Reserve — and done little to foster the impression that he cares about the public’s top concern.”
And as Trump’s popularity declines, writes Ponnuru, “we are also seeing the interaction of our constitutional system and a president who is neither interested in nor adept at working through it. A determined president can make the Justice Department issue frivolous indictments. He can’t make the courts respect them.” His efforts to slash the federal budget via DOGE were always destined to fail as “they would not have been able to make a dent in spending without action by Congress.” He also never secured congressional buy-in for the war with Iran, and “going to Congress for prior approval of the war, as constitutionally required, would have either built the needed support or shown that it would not materialize and spared both the country and Trump this defeat.”
As a result of all this, while Trump’s movement has had a few notable impacts that could prove lasting — such as the gutting of the Voting Rights Act — most of his policy endeavors are unlikely to stick. “The most enduring changes a president can make are the ones that the opposition party finds itself having to make peace with,” writes Ponnuru. “Think of the New Deal or the Reagan revolution. The Democrats have instead been radicalizing in response to Trump, which makes the president’s achievements — notably border control — more insecure.”
In the end, concludes Ponnuru, “The results of the Trump presidency so far are disappointing some of the people who voted for it. (Hence the poll findings.) But they ought to be encouraging in one important respect: It turns out that even in our era of heightened executive power, a president can’t consistently get his way through the sheer force of his will.”
