Trump's Not-So Secret Weapon
A Personal Army
It’s Christmas morning for the far right. With Donald Trump as president, Republicans controlling Congress and a conservative Supreme Court, they’re looking to get just about everything they want. They’re even seeing an opportunity to get rid of some things they don’t want, like affirmative action and abortion.
What really is the source of their power? It’s not public opinion. President Trump started his second term with the lowest job approval rating of any elected president on record according to the Gallup poll, which has been polling presidential approval for 65 years. Only 47 percent of Americans started out approving the job Trump is doing; 48 percent disapproved. No previous president has begun with a lower rating than Trump – except one: Trump, when he first took office in January 2017 (45 percent approval).
In the 2016 election, Trump lost the nationwide popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton (46.1 percent Trump, 48.2 percent Clinton). Last year, Trump carried the nationwide popular vote (49.8 percent Trump, 48.3 percent Kamala Harris), though by only 1.5 percent. He is the only president to start out (twice now) with a job approval rating below 50 percent. The average initial job rating for elected presidents from Eisenhower through Obama: 61 percent. (Joe Biden started out at 57 percent in 2021.)
Most Americans simply don’t like Donald Trump. In a poll conducted in January for the Associated Press by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, 55 percent of Americans said they had an unfavorable opinion of Trump (41 percent had a favorable opinion). If most American don’t like Trump, how in the world did he get elected?
The answer, most likely, is that he is perceived as a strong leader – an essential quality in a president. A year after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, former Democratic President Bill Clinton explained the continuing popularity of Republican President George W. Bush this way: ``Strong and wrong beats weak and right.’’
In a Gallup poll shortly before the 2024 election, 59 percent of voters called Trump ``a strong and decisive leader.’’ That was more than the 48 percent who said his Democratic opponent, Kamala Harris, was strong and decisive. At the same time, 60 percent called Harris ``likeable.’’ Only 38 percent called Donald Trump ``likeable.’’
Since presidentiaI job approval usually goes down after the initial rating, Trump may not have much of a honeymoon. But again, personal popularity is not really the source of President Trump’s effectiveness. What Trump has is an army. It’s a personal army – his ``MAGA’’ army (``Make America Great Again’’). The MAGA army has taken over the Republican Party (Trump gets a 91 percent approval rating from Republicans). And polarized the country (Trump’s approval among Democrats is just 6 percent).
Trump’s army enforces discipline through fear. The MAGA army threatens to ``primary’’ any Republican who opposes Trump, or simply disagrees with him, by running a MAGA candidate against the dissident Republican in the GOP primary. Not many Republicans can survive a MAGA onslaught in a Republican primary, not even in liberal areas of the country. The Republican electorate may be small in those places, but it is easily dominated by Trump’s MAGA forces.
President Trump likes to talk about his ``landslide’’ victory in last year’s election. But a 1.5 point lead in the popular vote was not a landslide. What enables Trump to claim a ``landslide’’ is his electoral vote margin: 312 to 226. That’s exactly what the electoral college is designed to do: make a narrow victory look more decisive.
Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin of Virginia – a state that Trump lost three times – justified President Trump’s actions during his first week saying, ``The steps that President Trump is taking are steps . . . that he told everyone he was going to do and received a massive, massive vote of confidence by the American people to do.’’
Want to see what a real landslide looks like? That would be Ronald Reagan’s victory over Jimmy Carter in 1980 by a margin of ten points in the national popular vote and 489 to 49 in the electoral vote. In 1980, Republicans gained 34 House seats and 12 Senate seats. In 2024, Republicans lost a House seat but still retained a slim House majority (220-215). The GOP picked up four Senate seats but that was enough to give them a Senate majority.
Unified party control of the federal government – White House, Senate and House of Representatives, plus a majority of Republican appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court – re-enforces the impression of a ``Trump landslide.’’ And the impression matters more than the reality.
Right now, Democrats are infuriated by Trump’s campaign to repudiate ``diversity’’ as an objective in government or business or education. Trump doesn’t care about diversity. He equates diversity with incompetence, which is exactly what he did at his press briefing following the tragic plane crash on Jan. 29 at Reagan National Airport.
At a news briefing following the crash, President Trump blamed the Federal Aviation Administration’s Diversity and Inclusion hiring plan ``which says diversity is integral to achieving FAA’s mission of ensuring safe and efficient travel.’’ Trump added, ``I don’t think so. I don’t think so. I think it’s just the opposite.’’
Trump sees diversity as threatening competence. He blamed the Obama Administration for determining that the FAA workforce was ``too white.’’ But there was no evidence that incompetent air traffic controllers, hired to meet diversity standards, were responsible for the tragedy.
Trump values unanimity. It’s the key to the effectiveness of his MAGA army. He wants Republicans to be a united conservative party ready to fight for the president’s objectives. And he is willing to enforce unanimity.
Last year, some hard-line conservatives in the House of Representatives opposed the re-election of Rep. Mike Johnson (R-La.) as House Speaker. Especially after Johnson was quoted as saying ``I’m willing to lose my speakership over Ukraine funding.’’ But Trump intervened to persuade the holdouts to support Johnson as the only Speaker who could hold the Republican Party together in support of Trump’s agenda.
An even bigger test will come this spring when the U.S. faces a debt limit that could immediately curtail federal government spending and shut down Trump’s agenda. President Trump opposes any debt limit. Trump has called himself ``the king of debt.’’ After all, he’s a builder, and builders thrive on big spending. Once again, Trump will have to overcome some hard-line right-wing opposition in order to enforce unanimity (or near unanimity) in his party.
President Trump does not have to be personally popular, and he isn’t. To be a successful president, you don’t have to be well liked. Jimmy Carter was not a successful president, but he was personally admired and well liked. To be a successful president, you need to be able to deliver. That’s what Trump, with the support of his personal army, is determined to prove.