This article was first published in the Mail on Sunday
Has the red-hot glow of the MAGA movement in America given way to a new and less enthusiastic band of devotees to The Donald: the ‘Grumpy Trumpers’? As one such disgruntled voter in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania puts it nearly year on from the President’s second inauguration: ‘Nothing has changed but every day you turn round and something crazy is going on.’
Last year, voters put their doubts about Trump to one side because they thought he, rather than his Democrat rival Kamala Harris, would deliver on things that mattered to them – especially the cost of living. My polling shows that around one in eight of last year’s Trump voters, more than enough to swing an election, backed him as the lesser of two evils.
But a year in, half of these reluctant Trumpers think the US is going in the wrong direction and more of them think they are worse off than better off. They give Trump low marks for his handling of the economy and worry that his beloved tariffs are making their lives more expensive. Though they applaud his tough stance on border control, the spectacle of immigration officers raiding businesses and arresting suspected illegals is too much for some.
And while these ‘Grumpy Trumpers’ think his second term is more disciplined and focused than the first, some think those qualities are being applied to the wrong things. ‘It’s like the revenge tour,’ one told us, talking of the President’s blizzard of legal action against perceived critics, now including the BBC. ‘He’s going after people who said things that hurt his feelings. I wouldn’t care if he did what he was supposed to be doing. Then I could turn a blind eye to it,’ the poll respondent added.
Since Trump burst onto the political scene a decade ago, voters have made a trade-off between the way Trump behaves and the things they hoped he would do. If they feel their life is getting better, Trump behaving like Trump is just the cost of doing business. But without delivery on those things, the ‘Donald Trump Show’ is all there is.
Having abandoned his claim that he might try for an unconstitutional third term (teasing or tyrannical, depending on your view of the 45th and 47th president), Trump might not think this matters. He’s clearly having the time of his life.
But it matters to his party. If Americans are to elect another Republican in 2028 – likely contenders include vice-president JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and even Donald Trump Jr, the president’s eldest child – they will have to consider the current Trump presidency a success.
In other words, unless Americans start to feel decidedly better off in the next three years, the door to the White House will be open to the Democrats. Whether they prove capable of walking through it is another question altogether.
For one thing, they are still unable or unwilling to come to terms with last year’s defeat. In my polling, Americans as a whole said Trump won because many Americans found his vision attractive, and that people felt worse off under Biden. But Democrats said it was because people wouldn’t accept a woman president, didn’t realise what was at stake, were misled by misinformation, and didn’t want a person of colour as president. As a party loyalist in Chicago told us, ‘The people who voted for him are uneducated. They didn’t have the sense God gave them.’ Another charmlessly characterised Trump supporters as ‘those crazy nut heads with their old no‑teeth Grandmama in the trailer’. Believing the voters you need to win over are sexist, ignorant, racist and stupid hardly seems the most promising platform on which to build a popular recovery.
Some Democrats say they want a more moderate and less divisive agenda. But it depends on your definition of ‘moderate’. To a lot of them, things like open borders and a radical approach to transgender rights are perfectly reasonable policies, and the only divisive thing is to oppose them. Beyond that, these voters – who will begin choosing their party’s nominee for president just over two years from now – are in no mood to reach out to waverers who, by voting even reluctantly for Trump, have put themselves beyond what they consider the bounds of civilised debate.
All this makes a Democratic victory harder, but doesn’t rule it out. For all the baggage he brings, Trump has brought in new voters and united his party in a way that once seemed impossible. If his second term ends badly, Republicans will be saddled with his record while losing the advantages he brings. If things go well, he will be the toughest act for any Republican to follow.
But his departure will also deprive his opponents of a powerful galvanising force. Trump has boosted Democratic turnout and submerged disputes on the Left beneath a tide of loathing for a common enemy. In that sense – and this is not something you hear every day – Donald Trump has been the nation’s Uniter-in-Chief. Whether as the hero or the villain, for ten years he has been the glue that held both sides together. Strange as it may seem, one way or another they will both miss him when he’s gone.
