Multiple polls show Trump’s approval at record lows, but I think what’s happening runs deeper than this. Something very dramatic is occurring.
Many people who consider themselves non-political or independent — or moderate Republican or who even voted for Trump in November 2024 — can’t avoid seeing what’s come so clearly into the open. And they’re finding it disgusting and terrifying.
They’ve watched Trump order the National Guard into cities over the objections of mayors and governors. They’ve watched Trump’s ICE agents drag people out of their beds in the middle of the night, zip-tie them and their children, and haul them away.
They’re watching the Justice Department argue that if the Democrat wins in Alaska’s Senate race, she shouldn’t be certified. They’re seeing Trump threaten to revoke the citizenship of Representative Ilhan Omar.
They see Trump direct the IRS, FBI, and Justice Department against liberal groups that oppose him. They’ve watched him push broadcasters to take off the air comedians who criticize him — Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel. They’ve watched him establish immunity from IRS investigations of himself and his family.
They’ve heard him say that Canada — Canada — is an enemy of the United States. That Putin — Putin — wasn’t the aggressor in the war in Ukraine. They’ve heard him defend Vivek Ramaswamy’s (the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio) disgusting ad featuring the estranged mother of Ramaswamy’s Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, calling her daughter a liar. (Acton hasn’t spoken to her mother since she was 12, when she was removed from her mother’s custody after her stepfather was arrested and charged with raping her.)
They’ve watched him decide, on his own, to take America into another endless war in the Middle East that’s driven up prices at the pump so high that many Americans can’t make ends meet.
All across America, millions of people who have avoided politics are shaken by what they’ve seen and heard.
It’s no longer Democrat versus Republican or left versus right. It’s now democracy versus dictatorship. Right versus wrong.
It’s no longer a war on undocumented immigrants. It’s now a war on Americans.
It’s no longer just a matter of repudiating Trump. It’s now a matter of stopping him — containing him.
Across the land, average Americans are realizing that they too could be dragged out of their homes in the middle of the night by Trump’s ICE agents, or tear-gassed and arrested by Trump’s National Guard, or targeted by Trump’s prosecutors, or shot by Trump’s military.
They too could be impoverished by his brainless, arbitrary tariffs and wars.
They too could be made unsafe, their children vulnerable to measles or other diseases, their health insurance unaffordable, their neighborhoods taken over by data centers —because the person in charge doesn’t give a fig about them. He’s in it for himself.
Trump has shown that all of us are endangered by him.
It is impossible not to see. Trump and his Republican sycophants are doing all of this in the open.
Most Americans abhor what they see, because what they see is abhorrent.
This is how the great sleeping giant of America awakens, roars, and puts an end to it.
This is how America throws the bums out.
Nine days from now.
Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/