One year into Donald Trump’s second presidency, he’s historically unpopular.
A New York Times/Siena College poll showed that nearly half of voters said that their life was worse off than it was four years ago. Despite his talk of affordability being a Democratic “hoax,” roughly 51 percent of voters said their life is less affordable now and 64 percent say that Trump mismanaged efforts to handle the cost of living.
Of course, no matter how much Trump teases it and no matter what Steve Bannon says, Trump will never be on a presidential ballot again. As per usual, he will make others pay the price for it; namely Republicans in Congress.
Survey after survey shows that Democrats lead the generic ballot, which determines whether voters would vote for a generic Democrat over a generic Republican in Congress. The generic often serves as a major indicator of how the country will vote in a midterm.
But don’t expect Republicans to find religion and stand up to the president anytime soon. If anything, this week shows just how much they are willing to allow Trump to do whatever he pleases.
As The Independent wrote this week, Republicans have done little to stand up to Trump - who had a 40 percent approval rating in the latest Associated Press poll - in terms and only a handful of Republicans have defected.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has regularly helped Trump and often either says he has not seen Trump’s latest remarks, refuses to comment on them or sometimes even defends them.
On Thursday, the House pushed the final spending bills across the finish line, including a spending bill for the Department of Homeland Security that provides $10 billion for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Thomas Massie, the perpetual critic of Trump, was the only Republican who voted against the bill, as public opinion has turned on ICE after the killing of Renee Good.
By contrast, seven Democrats – all of whom hail from districts that voted for Trump – voted for the legislation, even as many other moderates from frontline districts opposed the bill.
During the same series of votes, Johnson and the Republicans kept the vote open during a vote for War Powers Act resolution on Venezuela pushed by Rep. Pat Ryan (D-N.Y.) to allow for Republican Rep. Wesley Hunt to arrive in time for the vote. Hunt has routinely skipped votes as he runs a quixotic campaign for Senate in Texas. But his late arrival allowed a majority to kill the resolution that would have limited Trump’s ability to conduct further strikes in Venezuela.
“Republican leadership holding a vote open so they can give away Congress’s single most important power — the decision to send our young men and women into harm’s way,” Ryan later said on social media.
It was a repeat of last week, when Republican Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Todd Young of Indiana reversed their votes on a War Powers Act resolution after Trump chastised them on Truth Social.
Part of this is due to the fact that Republicans have limited margins in the House and Senate. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s exit from the House and Doug LaMalfa’s death reduced the Republican margins to 218, the exact number needed to pass anything in the House.
And on the Senate side, Republicans have only 53 seats, which means they cannot overcome a filibuster and can only afford to lose three senators at any time before Vice President JD Vance comes to break a tie as he did with Pete Hegseth’s confirmation and the One Big, Beautiful Bill.
But contrast today with the Democratic side during Joe Biden’s presidency, wherein then-senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia regularly torpedoed parts of Biden’s agenda and numerous nominees. The fact Manchin hailed from a state that overwhelmingly supported Trump meant Democrats deferred to him to keep their majority.
In the same token, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries will likely not chastise the seven Democrats who voted for the Homeland Security bill despite his own opposition to the bill because he recognizes he needs to give those frontliners leeway to vote with Trump, even if it angers progressives.
That relative independence allows Democrats with tough races to have a better shot at winning. But Republicans in swing races are increasingly tied to the least popular parts of Trump’s agenda, which could spell doom for the midterms and Republican hopes of keeping a majority in Congress.
That could ultimately lead to the unraveling of the majority and Trump’s best bulwark against any sort of accountability. By forcing Republicans to walk the plank on his policies, Trump weakens himself in the long term.
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