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It turns out that Trump’s blitzkrieg of extreme actions in the first month of his second term is not at all popular with the American people. A number of polls that have come out in the past week all agree on this. In most of these polls, Trump is now six points underwater in favorability, which is fifteen points under any other president in history at the beginning of their terms. Trump is the least popular president in the history of such polls.
In specific areas, the unfavorability ratings are even worse. Handling of Gaza: -40. Tariffs: -11. Cozying up to Putin: -72. Fan-boy Musk being given carte blanche: -12. People opposed to Trump’s blanket pardons of Jan. 6 perpetrators: 83%. In the Washington Post/Ipsos poll, 63% of Americans said they were concerned about their personal data being accessed by Musk and his unvetted minions.
And the favorability ratings in certain age groups are even more precipitous. Gen Z’s approval rating of Trump dropped more than thirty points in the first month of his term.
Trump does not have the support of the American people one month in, which means he’s probably going to have to use force at some point to maintain control, which will further increase the enmity and unrest among the people. And/or he’ll need to create a tremendous distraction. In these early days, the Trump administration has to move as far as they can as fast as they can, and then try to clean up the mess later.
What the Trump regime is trying to do domestically, as codified in the Project 2025 blueprint, is incredibly ambitious. In his State of the State address on February 19, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker pointed out that “It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.”
On Friday, February 21, Trump purged the entire US military leadership, firing the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chief of Naval Operations, and the Air Force Vice Chief of Staff. In response, military specialist Tom Nichols wrote in the Atlantic, “Now that Trump has captured the intelligence services, the Justice Department, and the FBI, the military is the last piece he needs to establish the foundations for authoritarian control of the US government.”1
These forces will be used against the American people when they rise up.
In these early stages, the response to Trump’s shock and awe campaign has been lackluster. Elected Democrats, for the most part, seem frozen in place, mesmerized by the flash. The courts, representing the rule of law, have moved too slowly to have much immediate effect. Checks and balances take some time to work, and in the meantime, a lot of damage can be done, especially by a reckless billionaire tech entrepreneur driving a team of young coders and hackers with a rage to break things and no idea what they’re destroying.
Big corporations, including tech corporations, hate and fear the federal government because it wants to regulate and tax them and limit their power. A billionaire taking a chain saw to the federal programs built to limit the power of giant corporations is of course popular with those corporations. But why would it be popular with citizens?
Since a lot of what Musk’s imagineers are destroying involves disproportionate aid to people in red states, the effects of these cuts are beginning to register with MAGA voters, and they don’t like it. Also, it turns out that about a third of all federal workers are veterans, so the jobs being cut by the DOGE interns are disproportionately affecting people who have served in the military.
This may all be eclipsed soon by what Trump is doing internationally. His mixture of utter incompetence and stupefying authoritarian arrogance is wreaking havoc with the post-war liberal world order. Trump has shifted his allegiances from our long-term allies in NATO and elsewhere to Putin’s Russia. He’s sided with Russia in its war of aggression against Ukraine and cozied up to other tyrants around the globe.
Steve Bannon, not to be outdone by his alter ego Elon, flashed a Nazi salute near the end of his speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on February 21, while shouting “Fight, Fight, Fight,” in imitation of Trump. The salute came right after Trump’s Vice President JD Vance supported the neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany (AfD) party in the German elections, and Elon Musk announced that “only the AfD can save Germany.”
But the new centrist conservative chancellor of Germany condemned the support of AfD by Vance and Musk and vowed never to bring the AfD into a coalition government, and he has wondered aloud whether the US will remain a democracy under Trump.
Bannon and Musk flashing the Nazi salute is a signal to the fascist wing of MAGA in the US, making sure that they remain on alert and ready to fight if called upon.
1. Tom Nichols, “A Friday-Night Massacre at the Pentagon,” The Atlantic, February 21, 2025.
David Levi Strauss is the author of Co-illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (The MIT Press, 2020), Photography & Belief (David Zwirner Books, 2020), Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow (Aperture, 2014), From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual (Oxford University Press, 2010), Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, with an introduction by John Berger (Aperture 2003, and in a new edition, 2012), and Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics (Autonomedia 1999, and a new edition, 2010). In Case Something Different Happens in the Future: Joseph Beuys and 9/11 was published by Documenta 13, and To Dare Imagining: Rojava Revolution, edited by Strauss, Michael Taussig, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Dilar Dirik, was published by Autonomedia in 2016, and in an Italian edition in 2017. The Critique of the Image Is the Defense of the Imagination, edited by Strauss, Taussig, and Wilson, was published by Autonomedia in 2020. He is Chair Emeritus of the graduate program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York, which he directed from 2007-2021.