Trump continues to make his own voters suffer

Donald Trump continues to hurt his own voters, and it has gotten much worse since his return to power. There is a temptation to gloat, laugh at and mock them, but that may be a trap which could further imperil American democracy. 

When he returned to office in January 2025, the president promised to return America to a new “Golden Age” in which the country would always be “winning” and the envy of the world. Instead, America’s prestige has been greatly diminished. No longer the world’s greatest democracy, the country has become a cautionary tale of self-sabotage and rising autocracy. The economy is struggling, inflation is persistent and working families are worse off than when Trump took office. In just one year, the American Dream has moved even further out of reach for a large number, if not a majority, of working- and middle-class people.

Behind this great destruction are real people, and many of them are Trump’s own voters. There are Hispanic Trump voters who thought, ”We are the good ones — Trump wouldn’t hurt people like us.” Black Trumpists who ignored his overt racism. White working-class Americans who assumed they would be unaffected by his attacks on the Affordable Care Act and SNAP benefits. Business owners who didn’t think their companies would be impacted by his mass deportation campaign. They have all been proven wrong.

Many of the president’s voters supported him because he promised to break the rules and punish groups they dislike and even hate — Democrats, liberals, Black and brown people, immigrants, the LGBTQ community, feminists and others. Now the same policies they supported have boomeranged on them. 

But after all they have endured — and are continuing to face — are Trump’s voters actually abandoning him? Are they now ashamed or embarrassed for supporting him and the MAGA movement?

In the end, the answer to these questions may be no, and Democrats, liberals, progressives and other pro-democracy Americans have been projecting onto Trump’s supporters what they desperately wanted to believe is true for their own self-comfort.

While his approval rating is at near-historic lows, Trump remains highly popular among GOP voters at 73%. However, polling also shows him losing support among non-MAGA Republicans, low-information voters and right-wing Independents.

Trump’s rainbow coalition of rage, resentment and anger is also fracturing. Hispanics and Latinos have moved away from him. Young men and non-college-educated voters are also souring on the president; both groups were critical to his victory in the 2024 election.

During a recent interview in the Bulwark, Democratic pollster Margie Omero explained that in focus groups run by the polling firm Navigator, approximately 14% of Trump’s voters say that they regret voting for him. That is a modest number, but in a very close election it could prove decisive. A larger percentage are increasingly disappointed and indifferent towards Trump and MAGA.

Trump’s enduring support remains a mystery and an object of derision for those who are outside of the MAGAverse, TrumpWorld and the larger right-wing echo chamber. From their perspective, given Trump’s failed policies and the widespread harm he is causing huge swaths of the American public, his support should be even lower.

In a recent essay, political psychologist Stephen Ducat explained why Trump’s MAGA followers remain tethered to him.

“[W]hen it comes to autocratic power in government, there is no ‘safe word,’ only obedience or obliteration,” he said. “But naked coercion makes political control brittle and unstable. And it can provoke rebellion. Much better to induce what psychologists call identity fusion, a state of mind in which, through imagined merger with the group and its leader, submission is reframed as vicarious domination.”

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The collective behavior of Trump’s MAGA followers, according to Ducat, is a classic example of the unhealthy behavior known as identification with the aggressor. “The fusion message to his base takes many forms, but the central theme is always: his self-interest is the tribe’s interest, which makes it your interest,” he said. “When he fights for himself, he’s really fighting for you. Each time no one holds him accountable for crimes, it is also you who are untouchable.”

For pro-democracy Americans — and others who generally want a return to some sense of normalcy — the Age of Trump has been a time of tears and laughter of frustration at a country where enough people were so nihilistic and desperate that they voted to put the president and his MAGA agenda back in the White House. There will be a flood of great joy and laughter if Trump and his MAGA Republicans are voted out of office in the midterms and then in the 2028 election.

But we must also be cautious about the dark allure of partisan schadenfreude and what it could signal about America’s deeply broken social and political culture. Political scientist Steven Webster warned that its “implications stretch beyond attitudes. In fact, it predicts the candidates that Americans support. Our study found that schadenfreude is the strongest predictor of an individual saying that they would vote for someone who promises to ‘harm supporters of the opposing party’ through the legislative process.”

Trump is a very skilled propagandist and charismatic leader, making it far from guaranteed that his most loyal voters will ever leave him. Even more troubling, the president gave his voters a license to indulge and engage in their own worst behavior — and that permission structure is greatly overriding their material and other rational self-interest. 

Pro-democracy Americans must be careful not to confuse mockery with tangible results and power. Dismissing Trump’s voters who are being hurt by his policies may feel good, but such behavior is no substitute for the hard work, organizing and alliance-building that will be necessary to save America’s democracy and renew its broken civic culture. If we don’t put in the effort, Trump and his MAGA coalition will cement their control over the country — and we will end up being the sad clowns.

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