Trump doesn’t care that you hate his immigration policy

At the outset of his second term in office, Americans were willing to give Donald Trump the benefit of the doubt. Every incoming president has something of a honeymoon period after inauguration, a few weeks or months when people (generally meaning independents and the opposing party) haven’t yet decided that he is terrible.

Trump wasn’t really a new president, as such, so there was no guarantee that he’d experience the same lift. But he did. In his second month, despite his furious effort to immediately reshape the government and the country, Trump generally enjoyed net-positive approval on key policy issues.

No longer. By the end of last summer he was underwater across the board. Even on immigration, an issue that was perceived to be a particular strength of Trump’s, significantly more Americans now see him doing poorly rather than well.

(I’m not going to spend time here getting into the debate over whether Democrats ought to have focused on the economy or on immigration when attacking Trump because it’s pretty clearly been settled. Attacking strengths is more valuable than highlighting weaknesses because you have the potential of eliminating that strength. It’s really not that complicated.)

The categories used above are necessarily broad, since it’s tricky to repeatedly ask poll respondents their view on dozens of specific policies. But YouGov has been asking people about a subset of Trump’s immigration policy: deportation. Over the past year, he’s gone from being plus-18 on it to minus-8. That’s largely because of a surge in opposition from non-Republicans — but also a small drop among Republicans.

One of the most remarkable recent poll findings came from CNN. Respondents were asked if they saw Trump’s presidency as a success or as a failure. Most said “failure.”

In fact, Americans were more likely to describe Trump’s second term as a failure than they were to use that word to describe his first term in the immediate aftermath of Jan. 6, 2021. Back then, only half of independents said Trump’s first four years in office were a failure. Now, two-thirds of them say his second term has been.

But note those numbers among Republicans. Nine in 10 approve of his deportation policies, even now. He’s well above water on approval on the various policy issues and overall. And while 1 in 9 see his presidency as a failure — which seems like a lot! — 8 in 9 don’t.

Maybe opposition to what ICE is doing will prompt him to reconsider his approach. Maybe concerns about how Republicans might fare in the midterms will do it. But he himself is not running for reelection (however much he likes to daydream about doing so) and has demonstrated an indifference to opposition that borders on the pathological.

When Renee Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent earlier this month, Trump and his team were quick to portray her as a “terrorist” who tried to run the agent over, neither of which was true. But then Trump learned from a CBS News interview that Good’s father was a Trump supporter.

“When I learned her — her parents, and her father in particular is — I hope he still is, but, I don’t know, was a tremendous Trump fan, he was all for Trump, loved Trump,” Trump said. “And, you know, it’s terrible. I was told that by a lot of people. They said, oh, he loves you. He was a — I hope he still feels that way. I don’t know. It’s a hard situation. But her father was a tremendous — and parents were tremendous Trump fans.”

That’s what he took away from Renee Good’s killing: It was primarily bad because her father was a Trump supporter.

That is what he takes away from all other criticism, too. Unless you are or were a supporter, he doesn’t care.

Photo: Trump “dancing.” (Flickr/White House)