The flailing and unpopular party elite needs to be replaced with fighting economic populists.
After only seven weeks, Donald Trump’s second go-round as president is already shaping be an even bigger fiasco than his first term, which ignominiously ended in 2020 when the largest electoral coalition in American history tossed him out of the White House. Unfortunately, unlike his first term, the opposition party is currently showing zero skill at harnessing anti-Trump anger to create a disciplined and effective resistance. The combined force of these two dynamics—Trump’s rising unpopularity and the fecklessness of the Democrats—creates the opportunity for a third force in American politics: a grassroots movement that can take over and reshape the Democratic Party in a more populist direction, in the manner that the Republicans were remade by the Tea Party Movement and Donald Trump.
The evidence of Trump’s collapsing political support is all around us: After a fleeting honeymoon period, his approval ratings are sinking and are now net negative, following the trajectory of his first term. Significantly, he is polling low on his handling of the economy, an area where voters had previously given him credit because of the robust job growth they remembered enjoying from 2017 to early 2020. In handling the cost of living crisis, a Reuters/Ipsos poll
