The Dictatorship
Trump’s approval sinks as protesters gear up for nationwide No Kings march
This is an adapted excerpt from the March 26 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
Donald Trump’s polling is in the toilet. According to a new Fox News pollnearly 60% of respondents disapprove of the job he is doing as president. The picture only gets bleaker as the poll digs into his approval on foreign policy and his handling of the war with Iran.
As that war stretches on, prices here at home are surging. Every day, Americans are feeling more and more squeezed.
Despite the sinking poll numbers, the president didn’t appear to have a care in the world at a Cabinet meeting on Thursday, droning on and on for almost two hours about his ballroom renovations, his special pens and the many cognitive tests he’s taken.
If you know anything about the 2024 campaign, it is that the core message, the main reason Trump won, is affordability. It is borne out in just about every bit of data we have: The key issue swing voters cared about was that things were too expensive.
Trump latched on to that message and hammered it home in simple terms at nearly every campaign appearance. He promised to end inflation and “make America affordable again” on Day 1 of his new administration.
However, a lot of the inflation issues had nothing to do with the Biden administration; they were a by-product of the pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and things were headed in a much better direction by Election Day.
But that did not matter. Trump hammered away at that message, and he won. Once he got to the White House, all the president had to do was just leave things alone. But of course, he did not.
Instead, the Trump administration has acted as if it had hired a crack team of consultants to study the problem and find all the ways they could possibly jack up prices for people, systematically doing everything they could to make things more expensive: imposing hundreds of billions of dollars in arbitrary tariffs on thousands of imported goods, starting a war of choice with Iran that has caused what could prove the worst oil shock in history and, to cap it all off, bullying the Federal Reserve — even threatening prosecution — to try to get it to lower rates prematurely.
So here we are. The price of food is up by nearly 20%and gas is almost $4 a gallon (or even higher in some states) because Iran has shut down the Strait of Hormuz. The war has also shot up the price of fertilizer, hitting farmers who were already dealing with the loss of major markets thanks to Trump’s capricious economic policy.
Mortgage rates jumped again, with the average rate on a 30-year mortgage just over 6%the fourth increase since the war began. Car payments are also upmaking it harder for people to buy or even just keep their vehicles.
However, if you listen to Trump’s treasury secretary, the American economy is doing just fine. On Thursday, Scott Bessent put out a statement saying that “under President Trump’s leadership, we are on a path toward unprecedented economic growth, lasting dollar dominance and fiscal strength and stability.”
The president is now printing his name on $100 bills to prove it — literally putting his name on money.
But Americans are not buying it. A recent Reuters poll found that over 60% of Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling the economy, which is worse than even Joe Biden’s lowest mark in that poll.
That is a large part of why Republicans are losing special election after special election. In fact, on Tuesday, a Democratic first-time candidate flipped the Florida state House district that includes Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence. It is literally happening in his backyard. So you can imagine what is bubbling up across the country.
It is not surprising that the resistance is growing everywhere you look.
Americans are tired of seeing their neighbors scooped up by immigration agents. They are angry that their neighbors, like Renee Good and Alex Prettiare being silenced and killed by federal officers at the behest of Trump. And now those same ICE agents are standing around at airports, getting paid to watch as TSA agents work without paychecks.
So it is not surprising that the resistance is growing everywhere you look, from the ballot box to the courts to Americans in the streets. This has been building up over the past year.
Because in America, there are no kings.
Back in June, about 5 million Americans took to the streets to prove just that. They did it again back in Octoberand even more joined their neighbors, as many as 7 million, according to organizers’ estimates.
Now there’s another one. On Saturday, organizers are predicting millions will turn out across the country at the third No Kings protest to say what more and more of the country is feeling: “No war, no kings, no more cruelty and threats to our neighbors.”
They will have a simple message for this administration: “Trump doesn’t run America. We do.”
Allison Detzel contributed.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).