The people who are dumping Trump

A MAGA man called my show to say he's sorry. It can sometimes be enraging when those who helped elect the authoritarian say they regret it. But it a good sign, as Trump flails big time. [Audio]

Donald Trump‘s approval ratings are dropping fast. He’s underwater in every poll, with a majority disapproving.

In a CBS poll released over the weekend, 59% of Americans said the economy is bad and getting worse. And a majority lays it at the feet of Trump, clearly seeing the chaos he unleashed with tariffs as a disaster, with 54% saying Trump's policies are more to blame for the bad economy and only 21 percent saying the blame is with Joe Biden.

This tracks with other recent polls. So Republicans and Trump himself can try to blame Biden until they’re blue in the face. That argument is only going to work with the most hard-core MAGA. And Republicans can’t win with just hard-core MAGA. They’re reportedly afraid of a “political wipeout.”

And it’s not just the economy. Young people who voted for Trump are leaving him in droves, horrified after seeing the deportations to torture prisons in El Salvador of people who’ve committed no crimes and the disappearing of international students on our streets. Trump is defying the Supreme Court on returning a man who was wrongly deported—sitting in the Oval Office with El Salvador’s self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator” yesterday and doubling down—something that is jarring many Americans and creating a constitutional crisis.

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Then there are specific people who have influence, right-wing figures with big followings, who now say they were wrong to back Trump. Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times today tracks a “vibe shift,” in which “several people who once appeared to find transgressive right-wing ideas scintillating are having second thoughts as they watch Donald Trump’s administration put those ideas into practice.”

I’ve heard this among some callers to my SiriusXM program. After I asked for MAGA with buyer’s remorse to call in last week, Mike from California called in, a three-time Trump voter who is now furious, sorry he voted for Trump in 2024. You can listen in to the call here.

Mike is a federal worker—and an actual rocket scientist, no less — but his job is fine. He saw other people, however, people whose jobs were vital, losing their jobs all around him. The mass firings and Elon Musk taking a wrecking ball to the government angered him.

The attack on social security. The mass deportations of people who committed no crimes, and in particular the story of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man wrongly deported who is now in the El Salvador hellhole prison, and who Trump refuses to return. The people disappearing from streets. The tariffs causing global economic disaster.

All of it infuriated Mike and made him sorry for his vote.

I, of course, had questions. Trump promised he would do all of this—the mass firing spree, for example, was all in Project 2025. Trump said he’d deport between 11 million and 18 million people, which would have to include millions of law-abiding people.

Mike’s answers won’t satisfy you. Mike believed Trump when he said he had nothing to do with Project 2025. “I believed what Trump said—but not any more!” Mike voted for Trump in 2020 even after the disastrous response to the pandemic because he didn’t support the lockdowns—and he even mentioned something about Anthony Fauci getting too much authority.

There was more. I could have argued these and other points with him. But when people say they’re sorry for supporting Trump and will work to support Democrats so we can blunt Trump’s power—which Mike “yes” to—I don’t push hard. Rather than alienate them at this point, I’d rather bring them in and make them part of the force against Trump. We can always argue later. And mostly, I want to get a sense of what changes these people and what might motivate others.

Among the people that Times columnist Goldberg, discussed in her column today on the “vibes shift”, is author Richard Hanania, who announced on X in recent days that he no longer supports Trump:

The writer Richard Hanania once said that he hated bespoke pronouns “more than genocide,” and his 2023 book, “The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics,” provided a blueprint for the White House’s war on D.E.I. But less than three months into Trump’s new term, he regrets his vote, telling me, “The resistance libs were mostly right about him.”

It’s impossible to know if these shifts will continue. But what we’ve seen so far, both in Trump’s numbers and also in the words of prominent and less prominent people who’ve jumped ship, is pretty pronounced. And it’s not like things won’t get worse. Trump is not, by any stretch, pulling back. He’s moving full speed ahead, more radical by the day.

So it’s likely we’ll see more people flee. And surely we can worry if it’s enough people—and if we’ll have enough time—before Trump turns the country into a full-fledged dictatorship. But we have no choice but to move forward, speaking out, galvanizing people—as Bernie Sanders and AOC are doing, brining out massive crowds while touring red states—and making sure the resistance is growing by the day.