Trump doesn’t seem to care what people want anymore

The Man Who Stopped Asking: How Trump’s Base Is Fracturing in Real Time

Activelifezero.com – A record-low 33 percent approval rating. That is where President Donald Trump now sits, according to a Reuters-Ipsos poll released this month. One in three Americans endorses his job performance — and the number of people who say they “strongly” approve has been sliding for months, landing at just 13 percent of the total electorate and 35 percent of Republicans in the latest survey. Roughly one in eight Americans considers what the White House is doing genuinely great. For a president who built his entire political identity on being the voice of the forgotten, the arithmetic is uncomfortable.

The numbers matter, but the trajectory matters more. In 2016, Trump’s ascent was widely framed as a populist eruption — a renegade figure shaking up a sclerotic establishment on behalf of ordinary workers and small-town voters. Ten years on, that brand has been almost entirely dismantled. What remains looks less like populism and more like its mirror image: a leader who increasingly acts on personal whim, aesthetic preference, and self-aggrandizement, with little regard for what the public actually wants.

The Canada Gambit, Seventy Days Before the Midterms

No recent episode illustrates the disconnect more sharply than the escalating trade confrontation with Canada. Trump has threatened to impose 50 percent tariffs on Canadian goods — a move that lands squarely in the middle of the midterm campaign stretch, when most politicians calibrate every decision against voter sentiment. A CNN poll conducted this spring found that 65 percent of Americans said existing tariffs were already hurting their personal finances. And the initial levies on Canadian imports, introduced last year, were unpopular from day one, with opposition ranging between 60 and 64 percent of respondents.

Yet the president pressed forward. On Tuesday he threatened to rename Lake Ontario as “Lake America,” extending a pattern that began when he purportedly rebranded the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” — a change around two-thirds of Americans opposed. Vice President JD Vance joined the theater on Monday, mislabeling Canada as a “state” and dismissing the slip as a “Freudian slip,” a nod to Trump’s earlier threats to annex the country as the 51st state. A Marquette University Law School poll conducted last year showed 75 percent of Americans opposed that annexation idea.

Data Centers: The Populist Question Trump Answered Wrong

If the Canada episode is about trade, the data-center controversy is about something more fundamental: who gets to decide what happens in your neighborhood. Opposition to new data-center construction has become one of the clearest populist fault lines in American politics. As many as seven in ten Americans say they do not want these facilities built in their communities, viewing them as impositions by powerful technology firms rather than welcome investments.

Trump’s fellow Republicans have turned sharply against the projects. The president, however, has embraced them with unusual enthusiasm.

“Big, strong, bold, and Money Machines.” “Cash Cows.”

Those are the phrases he has used to describe data centers. He has told communities they should welcome the facilities and praised their physical design as

“the most incredible buildings I’ve ever seen.”

He has even criticized fellow Republicans who back local moratoriums halting data-center development. For a figure who once positioned himself as the champion of communities against outside corporate overreach, the inversion is stark.

The “Golden Age” Problem

The broader pattern is not merely a collection of unpopular pet projects. It is a sustained choice to prioritize the president’s own agenda over the issues voters say dominate their lives. Americans overwhelmingly want a laser focus on affordability, inflation, and household economic security. Instead, Trump repeatedly declares that the country is living through an economic “golden age.” The polling does not support that framing: in the same Reuters-Ipsos survey, just 4 percent of respondents described the economy as “very strong.” Overwhelming majorities in multiple polls believe the president is neglecting the most pressing economic concerns.

What Comes Next

The midterm elections of 2026 will present an unusual test. Voters are being asked to decide whether partisan loyalty can survive a president who has cast off even the appearance of responsiveness to public opinion — who pursues a sequence of initiatives that large segments of his own base find uncomfortable, while dismissing the economic anxieties that drove many of those voters to him in the first place.

The populist who once promised to drain the swamp has, in practice, become something closer to its opposite: a leader whose decisions flow from personal desire rather than popular mandate, whose approval floor keeps falling, and whose remaining loyal base — measured at roughly one in eight Americans — grows thinner with every polling cycle. Whether that thinning translates into electoral consequences in November remains the central question of the year.