When Donald Trump addressed the nation in the early hours of November 6, 2024, he didn’t just celebrate his improbable return to the White House. He hailed an unprecedented political realignment. “This campaign has been so historic in so many ways,” he said. “We’ve built the biggest, the broadest, the most unified coalition. They’ve never seen anything like it in all of American history. They’ve never seen any. Young and old, men and women, rural and urban. And we had them all helping us tonight.” Trump had long claimed, bombastically and without evidence, to be a historically transformative leader who appealed to all corners of society. But now, it didn’t seem ridiculous that he might be remaking the lily-white Republican Party into a right-wing Rainbow Coalition.
As is almost always the case with newly elected presidents, Trump was exaggerating his victory and his mandate. By historic standards, it was a modest win (at best). He won the popular vote, and swept swing states, but did so narrowly. Still, he was right to crow—and Democrats were right to panic. Trump really had made significant inroads with many long-standing Democratic constituencies: young people, Black voters, and Arab Americans, in particular. While Kamala Harris trotted out past presidents and celebrities like Oprah and Beyoncé, Trump made strategic alliances with bro-y podcasters (Joe Rogan), disgraced rappers (Kanye), and kooks (RFK Jr. stans). Democrats were not only out of power; their entire electoral playbook was in tatters. If Trump could hold onto his new voters while maintaining his sizable, doggedly loyal MAGA base, the party was screwed.
Today, just six months into Trump’s second term, things look very different. Voters still hate Democrats: A Monday Wall Street Journal poll found that 63 percent of voters had an unfavorable view of the party, the lowest figure on record. But, increasingly, voters hate Trump too. A lot. And it’s not just his new voters: Trump’s MAGA base is showing signs of wavering for the first time since the January 6 insurrection, thanks to his handling of the controversy over Department of Justice files related to the late financier Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted pedophile and accused sex trafficker who was Trump’s close friend for nearly two decades. Everywhere you look, Trump’s support is collapsing.
The credulous Beltway press has long depicted Trump as a singular marketing genius: the “Michael Jordan of name-calling” and the country’s arch purveyor of political merchandise (hats with 40-year-old slogans on them). There is a touch of truth to this; Trump has a Barnumesque knack for generating attention, and his tendency to play to the crowd means he can run laps around most focus group–tested messaging. But it has always been overstated. The nicknames are almost all clumsy and cringeworthy (just look at “Panican”); his political slogans have a (similarly) remarkably low hit rate. In both cases, his winners—or at least those with a long shelf life, such as “Build the Wall,” “Crooked Hillary,” and “Make America Great Again”—date back to the early days of his first presidential run.
Trump’s real talent isn’t for moving voters to where he is but identifying where voters are—and then saying what other political leaders are too afraid to say. His rapid rise within the Republican Party came from simply recognizing that the party’s voters were significantly further to the right on immigration than most of the party’s presidential candidates. Trump parroted back to voters what they were already saying about undocumented immigrants, and he rapidly rose in the polls. More recently, Trump has succeeded by pushing messages that resonated with groups whose loyalty to the Democratic Party was less than absolute. In 2024, he argued that the political elite was out of touch; that it took young, Black, and Latino voters for granted; and that he—given his unorthodox foreign policy, to describe it favorably—could end the genocide in Gaza. He also shrewdly aligned with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a scion of the nation’s most famous Democratic family whose base was loosely correlated with support for Democrats: Trump won his endorsement by promising him real power, and likely won a substantial number of votes as a result.
In 2016, Trump asked a group of Black voters a rhetorical question: “What the hell do you have to lose?” It was a message that didn’t really resonate in 2016—but it did to a much greater extent in 2024. Trump doubled his support with Black voters, from 8 to 15 percent. But already, there seem to be regrets among this group. In January, just 44 percent of Black voters disapproved of Trump’s presidency; as of early July, 72 percent did. This is happening with other groups as well. In 2024, he improved his margins among young voters and ran roughly even with Harris with men under 30; his approval rating with young voters now stands at just 28 percent—down 27 points in just six months. Arab Americans who helped Trump win Michigan are furious over his handling of Gaza and his numerous travel bans targeting the Middle East. And although there isn’t recent polling specific to Kennedy supporters’ opinion of Trump, there is clear evidence of growing angst among his allies—Laura Loomer, most prominently—that Kennedy is being stymied by those in Trump’s orbit with ties to Big Pharma.
It isn’t just casual Trump voters who are backing away, however. His own base is fiercely critical of his handling of the “Epstein files”—the name for the Department of Justice case documents relating to Epstein’s sex crimes, which are believed to include the names of many prominent figures, Republicans and Democrats alike. Fewer than two in 10 Republicans approve of Trump’s handling of the files, while 82 percent want them to be released in full. This isn’t just a minor issue, either—it gets to the heart of Trump’s appeal to these voters. Their ironclad support is based on the fact that they doggedly believe that he is different from the other corrupt politicians and deep staters in Washington, and that he is committed to eradicating those people from the government. His failure to follow through on his (admittedly half-hearted) promise to release these files has rattled his core supporters, even as he is ramping up an unprecedented deportation regime.
There are signs that all of this is going to get worse too. Trump has no way out of the Epstein problem; he can either continue to stonewall, which makes him look guilty, or he can release everything, which may make him look even guiltier. Prices are rising again, thanks to a tariff strategy that makes no sense whatsoever and amounts to yet more inflation for the American consumer. The massive tax cut for the rich Trump just signed into law will soon have to be paid for by stripping poor people of their health care and jacking up costs for those on the Affordable Care Act exchanges. The situation in Gaza is worse than it has been in two and a half years. His deportation regime, which will only expand under the new budget law, is causing widespread horror and outrage in communities across the country.
The Democrats, of course, still have a problem: No one likes them either. Their base is justifiably furious with Democratic leadership’s failure to do much to stop Trump and, relatedly, its inability to settle on an effective message about an increasingly authoritarian administration. Swing voters are still down on the party, which they blame (unfairly) for post-Covid inflation and (fairly) for propping an octogenarian Joe Biden when he was clearly unfit for the job.
But that may be something Democrats don’t really have to start worrying about until they retake power in some form, perhaps after next year’s midterm elections. For now, all that really matters is that Trump’s support is tanking—and he looks powerless to halt the slide, let alone reverse it.