Ross Douthat says Donald Trump has lost America after year in office

This is hardly a new situation. It’s not like scary new information has been uncovered about the President of the United States in the last few days.

(Though I don’t think it helps that Obama posted the picture of monkeys and refused to apologize.)

I started thinking about this later some comments It is written by moderately conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, who is a frequent critic of Donald Trump.

“I want to tell you a secret,” Douthat says in the video. This sounds exciting.

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“Something most conservatives on the internet don’t want you to know. One year into his second presidency, Donald Trump has lost the country.”

Is this true?

He’s not saying Democrats will crush the GOP in the midterm elections the way the Seattle Seahawks destroyed the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl.

It plays clips of experts analyzing the latest polls; Trump, for example, has a 37% approval rating, and a majority of Americans say the country is worse off than it was a year ago.

So is this the rarefied view of the Acela corridor intelligentsia that does not reflect the Silent Majority popularized by Richard Nixon and that Trump has now espoused?

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Let Douthat make his case: “And all of this was predictable. From the early days of DOGE to the fiasco in Minneapolis, the Trump administration has consistently governed as if undecided voters weren’t part of the coalition. And now guess what? They aren’t.”

Let me give a few warnings:

Donald Trump has been declared politically dead with surprising frequency over the past decade. After his “Access Hollywood” comments, he started having his way with women. After Stormy Daniels was paid hush money. And even by most Republicans after the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

Not to mention that four indictments with a single conviction undoubtedly helps Trump because it is seen as overkill.

How many political geniuses thought at the time that Trump could come back and win a second term?

Few among the political intelligentsia were truly ready for Trump’s comeback. (Saul Loeb/Pool via REUTERS)

While I acknowledge that the Democrats are bearing hurricane-force winds in the midterm elections, this election is still nine months away due to so many unknown variables, especially the state of the economy in the wake of Trump’s tariffs.

Moreover, Trump’s divisive governing style has always focused on playing to his MAGA base; while doggedly accusing Democratic leaders (Tim Walz “seriously r——d”) and their cities (Baltimore is a “hellhole”) and saying Somalis are “trash” and should be sent home.

“But here’s the thing,” says Douthat. “When the Trump administration becomes unpopular, the losers are not moderates and swing voters. It’s people on the right. People like me, and certainly people further to my right, support a lot of the things the Trump administration is trying to do, from securing the border to pressuring American institutions to be more ideologically diverse, to resetting and rolling back DEI. All of these agendas will disappear if the Republican Party doesn’t win the election.”

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After offering various explanations, I have to say that I think Ross Douthat is onto something.

We went through a period where the president kidnapped the leader of Venezuela (though Nicolás Maduro is a crooked thug), threatened to take over Greenland, alienated Canada with his 51st state address, dismantled the East Wing, ordered his name engraved on the Kennedy Center, and presided over the longest government shutdown in American history.

And Jeffrey Epstein remains faithful to his files, but I argue that the documents confirm that he did not personally commit sexual abuse.

Although such attempts are often overturned by the courts (such as when a judge threw out charges against Jim Comey and Letitia James), Trump has also made no effort to conceal his revenge campaign against his political enemies.

The Jeffrey Epstein files are a persistent albatross for the president. (Davidoff Studios/Getty Images)

I think it’s more instinctive than that.

ICE’s egregious excesses have fueled a violent backlash against the federal forces who campaigned for Trump’s mass deportation program. And violence against these agents is, of course, reprehensible.

But every few days, Americans hear or watch phone videos of ICE detaining a 5-year-old child, of ICE dragging a man in his underwear through the snow before sending him back, of ICE removing American citizens from their cars, of ICE breaking a car window and covering the baby with shards of glass after being told the one-month-old baby was in the back.

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DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin told me in a conversation: video podcast interview He said he stands by his comments that Renee Good is a domestic terrorist.

But what truly shook the country and made Minneapolis look like a war zone was the murder of Good, who had just dropped off his child at school, and specifically Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse who worked with veterans.

The president toned down his rhetoric, saying ICE should use a “softer touch,” expressing sympathy for dead Americans and initiating a partial withdrawal from Minnesota.

Sometimes the accumulation of problems reaches a tipping point; this grabs people by the throat and won’t let go, causing permanent damage.

The murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti effectively turned Minneapolis into a battleground. (Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

So has Trump lost the country? Complicated.

The tipping point issue easily becomes shorthand for all the other traits people dislike about a politician. The economy isn’t actually that bad, with an unemployment rate of 4.4%, but many Americans think they’re worse off.

ICE’s sometimes brutal tactics targeting illegal immigrants, dubbed the “worst of the worst,” are increasingly being used against American citizens.

Less than 14% of the nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested by ICE last year had charges or convictions for violent crimes, according to a Homeland Security document obtained by CBS.

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And then there are the children caught in this web. According to a lawsuit, 18-month-old Amelia was rushed to the hospital for life-threatening respiratory failure, then sent back to a detention center in Texas, where she was allegedly not allowed to take daily medications prescribed by doctors. The toddler was “on the verge of death” as he struggled to breathe, an immigration attorney at Columbia Law School said, according to NBC. (Amelia was released after the case was filed.)

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I would never discount Trump’s ability to rebound. But the concern over ICE and the attacks on this country’s citizens have left an indelible scar on his presidency.