Trump’s Shrinking Coalition
Tulsi Gabbard, a combat veteran who detests military intervention, joined the MAGA coalition full of hope that Donald Trump shared her beliefs. Gabbard especially despises—or at least despised—the notion of meddling in Venezuela, a once far-fetched idea that she had denounced many, many times.
But it turns out that President Trump’s foreign-policy doctrine is not actually isolationist. Although he doesn’t care about defending allies or toppling dictatorships to spread democracy, he’s perfectly happy to intervene overseas to steal resources or simply to show other countries who’s boss.
Gabbard has had to swallow her principles, first when Trump bombed Iran, and then when he did the very thing she had accused the neocons of plotting: invading Venezuela to take its oil. As director of national intelligence, she is stuck issuing rote endorsements of the administration’s position. “Kudos to our servicemen and women and intelligence operators for their flawless execution of President Trump’s order to deliver on his promise thru Operation Absolute Resolve,” she wrote on X on Tuesday. Poor Tulsi Gabbard never thought the leopards would eat Nicolás Maduro’s face.
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There’s good reason for Gabbard to toe the party line—resigning would do nothing to advance either her policy agenda or her employment prospects. But millions of people who voted for Trump for reasons similar to Gabbard’s, but didn’t bet their whole career on supporting him, have no such dilemma. They can simply drift away from his coalition. By all accounts, this is exactly what’s happening. Trump is bleeding support, notably among his newfound constituencies: young people, minorities, and populists who distrust the system.
Trump has expressed bewilderment that his approval ratings could be so low given the breadth of change he has enacted. “I wish you could explain to me what the hell is going on with the mind of the public,” he complained at a recent gathering of House Republicans. “We’ve had the most successful first year of any president in history, and it should be a positive.”
In the president’s mind, he is living his best, Trumpiest life, and the public ought to be rewarding him for it. What he seems not to grasp is that he is losing support in no small part because he is accomplishing so many of his goals.
Winning national elections requires building big coalitions, including with groups that disagree with one another. Trump has a rare and underestimated talent for finessing these internal fissures. His rhetorical style is rambling, dishonest, and inconsistent, which makes it hard to pin him down on specific commitments. As a result, voters often see in him what they want to see.
During the campaign, Trump generally linked immigration with crime, leading many voters to believe that his plan was to focus on deporting criminals. This enabled him to make huge gains in Latino communities, which often bore the burden of accommodating the migrant surge during the Biden administration. Many of those voters have been surprised to learn that Trump’s immigration policy is actually inspired by the belief that the entire immigration pattern of the past half century was a catastrophic, civilization-threatening error, and that Trump intends to roll it back by unleashing a massive enforcement army that detains people who simply look like undocumented immigrants, with scant attention to due process.
Likewise, Trump performed well with low-income voters, many of whom expected or hoped that as president he would spare the social benefits they rely on. Indeed, Trump did not run on any promise to cut Medicaid or food stamps, and he discussed health care only rarely and in vague terms. But he has carried out the largest upward redistribution of wealth in American history, and he is taking health insurance from millions of Americans.
Those reversals might have been predictable to people who had been paying close attention to policy. What has been more surprising is Trump’s alienation of voters who are sometimes described as being “anti-system”—people who distrust authority and often gravitate toward conspiracy theories. Those voters are disproportionately young and male, and they get their news from mostly untraditional sources, such as Joe Rogan and Nick Fuentes. Their embrace of Trump had appeared to signal a durable expansion of the Republican coalition.
Trump, however, has squandered their trust. These anti-establishment voters wanted the Epstein files released, and they believed the promises of FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi that they would be. Trump has instead engaged in a clumsy cover-up, insisting that the files are both a fantastical hoax devised by his enemies and also too boring to even merit discussion.
The president also purported to champion free speech. Trump is no civil libertarian, yet he managed to present a contrast to a scolding moralism that had spread through much of American culture, especially schools and Hollywood. His willingness to offend the sensibilities of liberal elites gave him a sort of outlaw appeal.
In office, though, Trump has relentlessly cracked down on the speech that he opposes, hunting down students who criticized Israel and targeting anyone who failed to discuss Charlie Kirk’s death in sufficiently reverent terms. Voters have noticed this hypocrisy, and polling has shown that a majority believed that Trump had restricted free speech.
Trump’s embrace of a neo-imperialist foreign policy is likely to further alienate those anti-system voters. People like Gabbard, who served in Iraq and Kuwait, saw overseas conflicts as costly distractions from domestic problems, and viewed American military power with deep cynicism. Trump’s moves to bomb Iran, invade Venezuela, and threaten Greenland—his policy of speaking very loudly and carrying a big stick—make it hard to convince his supporters that he’s focusing on domestic concerns.
A through line connects these apparent reversals. Trump is alienating anti-system voters because he now controls the system. His appeal lay in his opposition to established power, but now that he has it, he is flexing it gleefully. He is the warmonger, the censor, the face of the Epstein cover-up.
It is hard to remain an outsider while holding the world’s most powerful job. But Trump seems not to have anticipated this, in part because he had far less trouble maintaining his anti-establishment identity in his first term. He managed this because that term consisted mainly of failures. Some of these failures were traditional legislative setbacks, such as the defeat of his bid to repeal Obamacare and his inability to pass the infrastructure bill that he had promised. But Trump also suffered an unusual inability to direct his own executive branch. He publicly entertained a stream of wild-sounding ideas, such as firing Special Counsel Robert Mueller and taking foreign oil, that he could not see through. His presidency ended in humiliation when he could not persuade Mike Pence to reject the election results.
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These setbacks not only spared the country the full brunt of Trumpism; they also positioned Trump as a kind of outsider within his own presidency. Trump’s bond with anti-system voters remained intact because he was constantly expressing his anger that the system was working to undermine him. He fought the law and the law won.
Trump is no longer making this complaint about the established forces working against him, because he has solved this problem. His presidency is filled with loyalists. He has largely overcome any reluctance that officials might have had in carrying out his most unethical or illegal demands. He can’t present himself as anti-system, because he has become the system.
Trump relishes this power and glories in making it as visible as possible. He has duly torn down a section of the White House, staged an Army parade on his birthday, put his name on the Kennedy Center, and so on. It is as if he wakes up every morning with a new plan for getting across the idea I’m in charge now.
Trump seems to assume that voters share his own worship of power. His most intense fans may revel in his displays of dominance, but his least attached supporters—the ones who turned him from a loser in 2020 to a winner in 2024—are recoiling.