Some people are panicking over supposed polls showing President Trump’s decreased popularity.
Let’s get real for just one second.
The actual statistics on President Trump’s popularity are about where they have always been. According to The Wall Street Journal:
Buoyed by voters’ improving views of the economy, President Trump’s political standing is showing notable resilience, a new Wall Street Journal poll finds, despite the unpopularity of the GOP’s big tax-and-spending law, dissatisfaction with Trump’s tariff plan and high suspicion that the government is hiding important information about its investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. … Some 46% approve of his job performance—unchanged from April—with 52% disapproving.
Eighty-eight percent of GOP voters approve of his job performance, and 66% strongly approve.
This means that President Trump’s support is durable, and that’s because life in the United States is as good or better than it was back in February or March. That’s the real reason we have not seen the sort of economic collapse many people were predicting, largely because Trump backed off of many of the tariff rates he was pushing on Liberation Day.
Instead, we’re seeing trade deals brokered by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. As I have said before, President Trump is not “chickening out” by backing off the tariffs. He is responding to reality.
Life in the United States is safer because President Trump took concerted and brave action in bombing the Iranian nuclear facilities, despite actual panic in the Republican Party, suggesting that such an action would lead to World War III. Not only did that not happen, it put Iran on its back foot in a serious way, and may completely reshape the Middle East.
A lot of people freaked out about the one “Big, Beautiful Bill.” But the reality — for those of us who actually have been following politics longer than five minutes — is that all of the concern over deficit spending in the one big, beautiful bill must have been ignoring the fact that the deficit in the United States has been blowing up for decades, and that the one big, beautiful bill did not change that trajectory in any way except a little bit downward.
That’s because in order for that bill to radically increase the debt and the deficit, you would have to assume the Obama tax rates from 2015 would snap back into place, which was not going to happen. Republicans were not going to let that happen.
Why is all of this important? Because the American people and the markets have gotten used to separating the wheat from the chaff when it comes to President Trump’s policies — which is the best way of looking at a president, not just the stuff that he says, particularly President Trump, but the stuff that he actually does.
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On Thursday, there was an outsized focus on a tete-a-tete between President Trump and Jerome Powell, Chairman of the Federal Reserve. The president took his criticisms directly to Powell at the Federal Reserve. It made for good TV. He went to tour the construction happening at the Federal Reserve building — a $2.5 billion renovation of two historic buildings designated as part of the Federal Reserve headquarters.
Trump suggested Powell is overspending on the rebuilding of the Federal Reserve.
Trump said that costs have gone up. Powell openly disagreed.
In a normal era, people might panic over this because the president of the United States was chiding the Federal Reserve chair, in front of everyone, about these alleged construction overruns.
Trump was asked, “What would you do if you’re leading a construction project and somebody went into cost overruns?”
Trump said, “I’d fire him.”
Anyone who thinks that Trump was making a serious threat is incorrect. That’s why the stock market did not react with panic.
The reason he’s not going to fire Powell is because the markets would freak out. And President Trump does not want the markets to freak out.
There are people on the Left that I know who were quite freaked out about President Trump being elected: “Oh, my God, it’s going to be the end of the world. He’s so crazy.”
I always say to them that there’s a beauty to the American constitutional system, and that system will blunt most of the stuff that isn’t good; if he or anyone else ever tried to subvert the Constitution, the judiciary would stop them.
The judiciary has done that. They’ve told President Trump many times not to do something, and then he has abided by the judicial rulings. In many cases, he’s been right, and the Supreme Court has ruled in his favor after a lower court did the wrong thing.
But there’s something else about President Trump that is unique: when he runs up against the guardrails of reality, he steps back from the brink.
And so when it comes to Jerome Powell — and again, there’s a lot of outsized panic in the commentary about Trump and Powell — he’s not going to touch Powell. And that’s because if he were to do so, the markets would react badly. And Trump does not want the markets to react badly.
So that’s what reduces the incident to the level of vaudevillian slapstick comedy.
The important thing again about President Trump is that he pursues heterodox policies. He’s breaking a lot of the stalemate that has characterized Washington, D.C., and a lot of the traditionalist thinking that has characterized Washington, D.C., on everything from economics to executive policy to the Middle East.
President Trump likes to break things, and many of those things deserve to be broken.
But President Trump also understands that if he is about to irrevocably break anything that is going to hurt him politically, he just won’t do it.
