By Ross Douthat / The New York Times
When Donald Trump’s approval ratings dropped sharply last April, the wound was essentially self-inflicted and the prescription relatively simple: Dial it back. Meaning smaller and less destructive tariffs, a retreat from brinkmanship with the Supreme Court, less random hacking away at government programs by Elon Musk and Co.
The administration did chill out, to some degree. Musk departed, the tariffs diminished from their “Liberation Day” maximum, the White House stopped shipping people to the Salvadoran dungeon and began picking its judicial battles more carefully. And sure enough, Trump’s approval ratings bobbed back up.
But now he’s down again, to the lowest point of this presidency, with the generic ballot threatening a midterm bloodbath for his party. And this time the prescription is less obvious, the trend harder to reverse.
Not that some of the damage isn’t self-inflicted, as it always is with Trump; from the Jeffrey Epstein stonewall to the botched handling of the shutdown to the constant stream of fighting words and insults. It’s always the case that the president could improve his political position by just being a little bit more magnanimous (in the style of his entertaining meeting with Zohran Mamdani), a little bit more normal.
But the most important problem is broader economic discontent, and there’s no simple reversal or tactical improvement that can help Trump here. He has entered the same territory as Joe Biden, dealing with an economy that isn’t terrible but leaves people chronically dissatisfied, and whose problems can’t be solved via executive fiat.
There are a few ways to think about those problems. The simplest reading would focus on inflation, which is still too high for public comfort even as it’s paired with high interest rates that are squeezing the life out of the housing market. In this environment, even if Trump could commandeer the Federal Reserve, it’s not clear what he could accomplish. Cut interest rates, and housing breathes again, but everyday inflation rises further. Raise them, and maybe everyday inflation eases, but then the housing market constricts, and growth with it.
This leaves fiscal policy as the zone for anti-inflationary action, via some kind of grand bargain on budgetary restraint; but we all know that won’t happen. The administration already spent its capital on the One Big Beautiful Bill, and the fiscal lever stands rusting with the rest of Congress’ powers. So prices and the housing market are left to heal themselves.
Now a second reading of our economic discontents: We are suffering from the incompleteness of Trump’s nationalist agenda. Tariffs, trade adjustments and immigration cuts are all meant to reset the U.S. economy, pushing industry toward domestic investment and native hiring, with pain along the way but a better bargain for the future.
But the sharpest advocates of this (highly contestable!) approach have always argued that tariffs make sense as part of a larger industrial policy program that supports domestic manufacturing and workers. Likewise, immigration cuts in an aging society only really make sense if you have plans to invest more heavily in families and children. And neither family policy nor industrial policy is much in evidence from this administration. So manufacturing is slumping, not reviving, the baby bust is still in force, and all the right-wing posturing about a return to good-paying jobs supporting single-earner families just looks like reactionary coping.
Then a final reading of the economic landscape: The administration has pushed a lot of chips into the artificial intelligence race, and that revolution may pay off too slowly for Trump to benefit politically while proving widely unpopular along the way.
This is not the bubble scenario; it’s just the more prosaic reality that tech adoption is generally slower than tech development. So even if AI systems keep progressing (which they are, though timelines that promised the eschaton by 2027 are being extended toward the 2030s), the bottlenecks of habit, regulation and slow corporate uptake may postpone any great productivity revolution into the next administration or the next decade.
And pending that revolution, the big gains from AI are in the stock market rather than in jobs or wages, while the public narrative around AI tends to promise massive disruption, the end of work as we know it, with a risk of apocalypse baked in. It’s hard to see how that combination — rich people compounding gains while normal people are promised that everything solid in their lives will soon melt into air — is going to be good for an incumbent administration.
Which doesn’t mean that the AI bet is the wrong policy, especially so long as China is making the same one. But it leaves the Trump administration in a position where its long-term policy bet is immediately unpopular, while on immediate-seeming issues, inflation and jobs and housing and manufacturing, it seems to have no policy at all. That’s the position of a political loser — and sooner or later, a lame duck.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2025.
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