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

This is hardly breaking news status. It’s not as if some terrible new information has been discovered in the last few days about the President of the United States.

(Although I don’t think he helped himself by posting a picture of Obama as an ape and refusing to apologise.)

I started thinking about this then Some comments By Ross Douthat, a moderately conservative columnist for The New York Times and, arguably, a frequent critic of politics. Donald Trump.

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

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Center-right New York Times columnist Ross Douthat posits that President Donald Trump has “lost the country.” (Al Drago/Getty Images)

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

Is this correct?

He’s not just saying that Democrats will crush the GOP in the midterms in the same way the Seattle Seahawks annihilated the New England Patriots in the midterms. Super Bowl.

It shows clips of pundits analyzing the latest opinion polls, such as Trump, whose approval rating is 37%, and a majority of Americans say the country is worse off than it was a year ago.

But is this the rare view of intellectuals in the Acela Corridor that does not reflect the silent majority, a term popularized by Richard Nixon and now embraced by Trump?

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Let Douthat make his case: “And all of this was predictable. From the early days of DOGE until the debacle in Minneapolis, the Trump administration has consistently governed as if swing voters weren’t part of its coalition. Now, guess what? They’re not.”

Let me raise some caveats:

Donald Trump’s political death has been announced with astonishing regularity over the past decade. After his comments on Access Hollywood about having his way with women. After paying the hush money to Stormy Daniels. And even by most of his fellow Republicans after the January 6 riot at the Capitol.

Not to mention the four indictments, with one conviction, which undoubtedly ended up helping Trump because they were seen as overreaching.

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

Few political pundits were truly prepared for Trump’s return. (Saul Loeb/Pool via Reuters)

While I agree that Democrats are facing hurricane winds in the midterms, they still have nine months to go with many unknown variables, especially the state of the economy in the wake of Trump’s tariffs.

Moreover, Trump’s divisive governing style has always been focused on playing to his MAGA base, while persistently denouncing Democratic leaders (Tim Walz is “seriously hardline”), their cities (Baltimore is a “hell hole”), and saying Somalis are “trash” and should be sent home.

“But that’s the thing,” Douthat says. “It’s not moderates and swing voters who lose when the Trump administration becomes unpopular. It’s people on the right. People like me, and certainly people to my right who support many of the things the Trump administration has tried to do, from securing the border, to pressuring American institutions to become more ideologically diverse, to resetting and rolling back DEI. All of that, all of that agenda would go away if Republican Party “Elections cannot be won.”

Federal shift to targeted immigration enforcement in Minneapolis under Homan’s leadership

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

We’ve been through a phase in which the president has kidnapped Venezuela’s leader (although Nicolas Maduro is a rogue thug), threatened to seize control of Greenland, excluded Canada from his 51st statehood address, canceled the East Wing, ordered his name engraved on the Kennedy Center, and oversaw a 43-day government shutdown, the longest in American history.

He is still being hounded by the Jeffrey Epstein files, even though I argue that the documents confirm that he did not personally engage in sexual misconduct.

Trump has made no effort to hide his campaign of retaliation against his political enemies, although such attempts are often rejected by the courts (such as the judge who dropped the charges against Jim Comey and Letitia James).

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

I think it’s something deeper than that.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s egregious abuses have sparked a backlash against federal forces implementing Trump’s signature campaign issue, the mass deportation program. The violence directed against these agents is of course reprehensible.

Yet every few days, Americans hear about, or watch phone videos of, ICE detaining a 5-year-old boy, ICE dragging a man in his underwear out into the snow before returning him, ICE pulling US citizens from their cars, or ICE breaking a car window after being told a month-old baby was in the back, covering the infant with shards of glass.

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Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin told me Video podcast interview She stands by her comments that Renee Goode was a domestic terrorist.

But it was the killings of Judd, who had just dropped her child off at school, and especially Alex Pretty, an ICU nurse who works with veterans, that really shook the country and made Minneapolis look like a war zone.

The president softened his tone, saying ICE should have used a “softer touch,” expressing sympathy for the dead Americans, and initiating a partial withdrawal. From Minnesota.

Sometimes the accumulation of problems reaches a tipping point, where they grab people by the throat and won’t let go, causing permanent damage.

The killings of Rene Judd and Alex Peretti turned Minneapolis into an effective war zone. (Stephanie Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Did Trump lose the country? It’s complicated.

The tipping point issue easily becomes shorthand for all the other traits people don’t like in a politician. The economy isn’t really that bad, with unemployment at 4.4%, but many Americans see their situation worse.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s sometimes brutal tactics, supposedly targeting illegal immigrants and the so-called “worst of the worst,” are increasingly being used against American citizens.

An internal Homeland Security document obtained by CBS says fewer than 14% of the nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested by ICE last year had charges or convictions for violent criminal offenses.

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Then there are the children caught in this web. According to the lawsuit, 18-month-old Amelia was hospitalized with life-threatening respiratory failure and then returned to a detention center in Texas, where she was allegedly denied daily medications prescribed by doctors. As the child struggled to breathe, “she was on the verge of death,” an immigrant advocate at Columbia Law School said, according to NBC. (Amelia was released after the lawsuit was filed.)

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I would never discount Trump’s ability to recover. But concerns about Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and the attacks on this country’s citizens, have left an indelible scar on his presidency.