Donald Trump has barely been back in the White House for a month, and it already appears that many MAGA voters and politicians are having buyer’s remorse. Unfortunately, there’s no return policy on the presidency.
Trump’s approvals have tanked, and he has the second-lowest approval rating of any president at this point into their tenure since 1953. The lowest? Also Donald Trump.
So why, then, did they vote him back into office?
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Maybe it was collective amnesia. Maybe it was boredom. Maybe it was an impulse to set the world on fire just for the sake of spectacle. Maybe it was a combination of low turnout, post-COVID malaise and a global trend toward anti-incumbency (if not anti-democracy). Whatever it was, it was definitely a mistake.
Republican voters are showing up at town halls across the country to yell at their representatives.
Indeed, there are all sorts of Trump supporters who are now shocked that they got exactly what they voted for.
There are the “Make America Healthy Again” fans of RFK Jr. who backed Trump at their preferred candidate’s behest, only to now realize they hate most of his policies. There’s the “lower the price of eggs” contingent now paying even more at the grocery store. There are the “drain the swamp” proponents shocked by the decimation of the federal workforce—especially when it includes their peers and kin. There are those who were fed up with Joe Biden’s pro-Israel stance but are now aghast that Trump has schemed to push Palestinians out of the Gaza Strip entirely. And there are those who seemingly crawled out from under a rock on Nov. 5 to cast their ballots, and are learning that maybe their preferred podcasters or MMA fighters aren’t the best people to take political advice from.
When I read quotes from these folks I can’t help to think about a famous Trumpism: “They’re not sending their best.”
These voters did not, to use a Melania-ism, Be Best. Or to quote the popular refrain, they are the people whose faces were indeed eaten after voting for the Leopards Eating People’s Faces Party. It is hard to muster up any sympathy for them, especially when they have led—or were led—to so much suffering, with infinitely more incoming.
No one needs to sympathize with these not-the-best voters or justify their actions. But it’s also necessary to resist the urge to shame or mock them (even if shame and mockery are indeed warranted).
The Trump presidency is dangerous. Trump has appointed a cabinet that is farcical in its incompetence, and that is the point: People who know that they would never be in their positions of power under any other circumstances are loyal only to the person who has put them there—it’s not as if Kash Patel or Tulsi Gabbard has some sterling reputation to protect, or a professional future to consider, after all.
We are already seeing previously independent federal agencies begin to work not for the people, but for the president personally. And the number of checks on this kind of abuse of power are fewer and fewer. Trump has already signaled that he will simply disregard court decisions—even Supreme Court rulings, from a court stacked with his own judicial picks. There is little indication that the Republican Party, which was de-spined by Trump long ago, would stand up for the basic separation of powers and rule of law.
Democracy really is on the line.
That means liberals and other Trump opponents have a duty to welcome defectors, converts and the politically unmoored into the fold.
A crucial thing to understand about normal-person politics—that is, the kinds of people who might vote but aren’t reading political columns in the Daily Beast or anywhere else, though I of course encourage everybody to read political columns in the Daily Beast—is that their impressions of Democrats and Republicans may be less shaped by what Democrats and Republicans actually do than how they believe Democrats and Republicans are. Their liberal and Democratic-voting friends, neighbors and co-workers in real life and on social media shape their perceptions.
It will be much more effective to speak with them, share information and offer them some grace than to make fun of them or pull an “I-told-you-so,” even if you did tell them so, and even if they do deserve to be made fun of. This is how you build a coalition. It’s how you build power. And it’s how we take America back from Trump—which is certainly more important than reminding everyone that you were right.
(You can and should, of course, gripe about them to other friends in private. That’s what a group text is for.)
If the stakes were lower, it would be easier to justify self-righteousness. But if you truly believe that the nation is as risk, then act like it—which means pulling in potential allies to the cause, not ostracizing them. In the coming weeks and months, the number of people badly affected by Trump policies will grow. Each of these people could be one brick in an anti-Trump wall, if we can get them to stand with us. And to pull people in, you sometimes have to bite your tongue.
None of this is to say that there should be no consequences. Those running the Trump administration, DOGE, and even Marjorie Taylor Greene’s social media accounts should pay a steep price. (At the very least, none of them should be allowed anywhere near politics or power ever again.) And those who voted for any/all of the above have certainly ceded their right to be trusted with basic decision-making; I would personally struggle to maintain a friendship with someone who cast their ballot for Trump. But that struggle, and the struggle, is real. To have a post-Trump reckoning, we need to get to a post-Trump reality.
The only way to do that is to meet disaffected Trump voters with an invitation to the other side—not a slammed-shut door.
