Donald Trump’s Presidency Is in Free Fall

Consider three of the biggest developments in our politics right now: We just learned that the economy lost 92,000 jobs in February, a capstone to a terrible year in terms of job creation. President Trump has fired widely despised Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, a key architect of his mass deportations. And reports are indicating that the killing of scores of Iranian schoolchildren might have been the handiwork of the United States.

What links all these things? In addition to the massive human toll they’re inflicting, they suggest that Trump is about to pull off a unique trifecta. He is squandering the advantage he and Republicans have enjoyed in recent years on three major GOP-friendly issues: The economy, immigration, and national security.

This isn’t meant as a political gotcha; it has important ideological and policy implications. When Trump took office last year, it was reasonable to fear that the American public would rally behind mass deportations and tariffs—that is, embrace two of the main tenets of right-wing nationalism. Meanwhile, the launch of the largest military attack in the Mideast in decades might have plausibly produced a rally-around-the-war-president effect.

None of that is happening. And that’s significant in not-so-obvious ways.

Let’s start with Trump and national security. According to an extraordinary video analysis by The New York Times, the horrific bombing of an elementary school in southern Iran—which killed 175 people, many children—occurred while the United States was conducting missile strikes in the area aimed at a nearby Iranian naval base.

What’s more, Reuters reports that military investigators now believe U.S. forces likely bombed the school. We should suspend final judgement, of course. But it’s looking very much like this atrocity—one of the worst massacres of civilians in memory—is the result of Trump’s war. Whatever we learn about it, there will inevitably be more such horrors.

Now look at this in the context of remarks from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and White House adviser Stephen Miller. Hegseth recently declared that the United States is dispensing with “stupid rules of engagement” and will no longer fight “politically correct wars.” Miller recently enthused that Trump’s military doesn’t have “its hands tied behind its back,” mocked the very idea of human rights, and insisted that “strength” and “force” and “power” are fundamentally all that matter in the international arena.

But we’re now learning why we have the sort of constraints on military conduct these men ridicule. “Trump, Miller and Hegseth’s FAFO approach to the use of official government force and violence comes with considerable risk,” Democratic Congressman Adam Smith told me, employing the acronym for “Fuck Around and Find Out.” Atrocities like the school bombing, he added, show the perils that come when we “brazenly dismiss any sort of rules of engagement designed to protect the lives and rights of civilians.”

The swaggering certainty of Hegseth and Miller, those two giants of American statecraft, is what’s notable here. As Alan Elrod writes at Liberal Currents, at times like this you can almost smell MAGA’s “bloodlust.” Clearly they have no doubt the public will rally behind this supposed display of Trump’s “strength.” Or maybe they don’t think it matters what the public thinks.

But it does matter. Data analyst G. Elliott Morris averaged high quality polling on Trump’s Iran invasion, and found that only 38 percent of respondents approve—the lowest initial support for an American war perhaps ever. Trump’s overall approval has also dropped a hair since the bombing began—it’s hovering at around 39-58—leading Morris to conclude that no rally-around-the-flag effect is materializing.

Also note that a CNN poll just showed that 59 percent don’t trust Trump to make the right decisions regarding the use of force in Iran, suggesting already-entrenched skepticism of Trump’s commander-in-chief abilities exactly when a “war president” boomlet might be expected to kick in. The school bombing will make this worse. In short, Trump has no built-in national security advantage. If anything he’s viewed as bad on it.

I’ve already tried to demonstrate at length that Trump is throwing away the GOP’s recent edge on the economy and immigration, too. The latest news reinforces this: The abysmal jobs report adds to a bigger picture in which job growth has been significantly lower under Trump than under his predecessor. His numbers on the economy are awful.

Meanwhile, Noem’s firing is partly a response to public anger over Trump’s invasion of Minneapolis. But it won’t solve his deeper problem. As long as the underlying agenda remains Miller’s dream of national ethnic reengineering—which requires going after non-criminals to get removal numbers up, necessitating more paramilitary violence in our communities—Trump will tank on the issue. As TNR’s Michael Tomasky notes, the durable public backlash is the big story here. Indeed, by one calculation, Trump’s net approval on immigration since last year has dropped by 20 points.

None of this guarantees a Democratic win this fall, and a rebound remains possible. Trump might end the war on a claim of victory, dial back paramilitary violence against Americans, and enjoy some kind of economic resurgence. Yet right now, George W. Bush’s fate is beckoning. While immigration was less relevant back then, the financial crisis and Iraq debacle wrecked Bush’s standing on the economy and foreign affairs alike. Iraq—and Hurricane Katrina—irreparably broke public impressions of Bush’s executive competence. From 2016 onward, Republicans largely recaptured these issues. But now Trump is drifting close to the Bush danger zone.

There’s another through-line here. I guarantee you that Miller and Hegseth believe a latent majority out there is quietly rallying behind zero-sum malignant nationalism (tariffs regardless of the consequences), the treatment of all undocumented immigrants as criminals (mass deportations), and a kill-first-think-later military posture (what Hegseth calls the “warrior ethic”).

This calculus assumes most voters will unthinkingly glimpse “strength” in nationalist belligerence, in unshackled state violence at home and abroad, in nakedly authoritarian abuses of power. The Miller-Hegseth calculation resembles the old Bill Clinton adage—that being “strong and wrong” is always politically better than “weak and right.” Trump can’t lose as long as he’s cracking the heads of the right “enemies,” whether they’re Euroweenie elites, “criminal illegal aliens,” or what Miller calls the “savages” in the Mideast.

That supreme hubris is now breaking up on the shoals of Trump’s malevolence and incompetence on tariffs, his undisguised white nationalist brutality on immigration, and his sociopathic warmongering amid an obvious lack of any real war rationale. In 2024, Trump coasted on (undeserved) GOP strength on the economy, immigration, and national security, but those pillars are now crumbling. Americans are seeing the real “America First” agenda up close—militarism, imperialism, malign nationalism, unabashed authoritarianism—and they’re recoiling. Though this is small consolation amid all the darkness enveloping us, it’s nonetheless a heartening development indeed.