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Hi, folks, it’s Will, sitting in for JVL today.
Yesterday Sam wrote about a recurrent problem in the Trump administration: It’s run by idiots.
The list Sam compiled is impressive: launching a global trade war based on bogus math; yapping about military plans on a Signal chat that included the editor of the Atlantic; inadvertently firing the people in charge of nuclear weapons security; and a lot more.
Yes, Trump and his accomplices are malicious. Yes, they’re corrupt. Yes, they’re dangerous. But they’re also profoundly stupid, and their stupidity is hurting or worrying a lot of people who voted for Trump.
So here’s my pitch: To break Trump’s coalition and reclaim our government, we need to talk not just about the administration’s corruption and its abuse of power, but about its pervasive incompetence.
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1. People know Trump bungled the tariffs
Let me show you some polls.
Start with last fall’s election. In the VoteCast survey of the 2024 electorate, 44 percent of voters said Trump bore “a lot” of responsibility for his supporters’ violence on January 6th. That was the harshest answer they were allowed to give. People who chose that answer said they voted for Kamala Harris, 92 percent to 7 percent.
That’s pretty solid. But you know what scored better? Forty percent of voters said Harris was more capable of handling the economy than Trump was. And those people voted for her by 97 percent to 2 percent.
On the merits, you might expect the numbers to tilt the other way. Trump attempted a violent coup! Shouldn’t that instantly disqualify him? But to most voters, it didn’t. Americans were more likely to vote against Trump if they doubted his economic management than if they believed he had launched an assault on the Capitol.
You could tear your hair out over this. But there’s another way to look at it: Trump has, in fact, handled the economy badly since he returned to office. And people know it. In an Economist/YouGov poll published today, 57 percent of American adults said Trump’s actions on the economy have hurt the country; only 24 percent said they’ve helped. Fifty-two percent said his actions on foreign policy have hurt the country; only 28 percent said they’ve helped.
Bottom line: People who don’t care about Trump’s authoritarianism—and who voted for him because they thought he’d be competent—might now be persuaded to stay home or vote for the opposition.
Donald Trump’s talent is exploiting popular resentments and prejudices. Twice now, he has translated that into presidential victories. His problem is what to do after he wins. He can sit at his desk—or in his golf cart, or in front of a TV—and watch other people execute scripted plans such as Project 2025. But where presidential judgment is required, Trump lacks the wisdom, patience, and work ethic to figure out how to pursue his objectives effectively or judiciously. He’s an oaf.
The result, politically, is a gap between public support for his goals and public support for his methods.
Tariffs are a clear example. Trump could have marshaled our allies in a united front against China’s worst trade practices. Instead, he launched a preposterous trade war against the whole world. He crashed the financial markets and had to back down.
You can see the results in two polls taken earlier this month, a few days after he announced his tariffs. In a CBS News/YouGov survey, 51 percent of Americans said they liked Trump’s goals in pursuing tariffs, but 63 percent didn’t like “the way he is going about it.” In a Harvard-Harris poll, voters split three ways. Forty-eight percent said Trump’s tariffs were “the right idea” but “required more patience.” On the other side, 31 percent said the tariffs were “the wrong idea regardless of execution.” The pivotal group, 21 percent, said the tariffs were “the right idea but it has been executed badly.”
This is a key to unlocking the Trump coalition: When the question is execution instead of goals, the middle of the electorate turns against him.
And when the damage hits people in the wallet, he can’t hide it. In the Harvard-Harris poll, voters were more than twice as likely to say they’d been hurt by Trump’s tariffs (38 percent) as to say they’d been helped (15 percent). In a CBS poll taken in late March, more respondents said Trump was costing America jobs (48 percent) than said he was creating jobs (33 percent).
2. People know about the other screwups, too
The same pattern shows up on issue after issue.
Take DOGE. Elon Musk and his collaborators have chainsawed their way through federal agencies, gutting or crippling programs that even many Trump supporters recognize as important. And the Harvard-Harris poll found that while voters like the DOGE concept, they don’t like the results.
The poll asked: “To reduce the budget deficits, do you think we mostly need to reduce government expenditures or to increase taxes?” Overwhelmingly, 78 percent to 22 percent, voters preferred to reduce spending.
Then the poll asked: “Do you think that the government expenditures are basically fair and reasonable, or do you think they are filled with waste, fraud and inefficiency?” Again, voters agreed with DOGE: 62 percent said the expenses were full of waste, fraud, and inefficiency.
But when the question turned to methods, the balance shifted: 55 percent of voters said Musk and DOGE were cutting government expenses “the wrong way.” Among independents, the shift was even bigger: Two-thirds agreed that government expenditures were full of waste, fraud, and inefficiency, but 60 percent said Musk and DOGE were cutting them the wrong way.
A Wall Street Journal poll taken in late March and early April found a similar split: 42 percent of registered voters said Trump “should keep going” with his cuts, 20 percent said he should stop, and the pivotal bloc—37 percent—favored cuts but said they “don’t like the way President Trump is going about doing it.”
Deportations are a different issue. But here, too, Americans are beginning to see the administration’s clumsiness. Exhibit A is the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia: Even the government’s lawyers have admitted that his deportation was an “administrative error.”