Americans are gradually turning against the president over his handling of immigration. Republicans will have to answer for it
If you can bear to hear it, there are still more than 1,300 days remaining in the Trump administration. That’s an interminably long time given all the havoc the president has been able to wreak since January alone; the chaos and cruelty of the term so far also happen to have used up his political capital remarkably quickly. The New York Times average of polls, which found him at 52% approval on inauguration day, had him at 51% disapproval on Wednesday. That collapse is less a problem for Trump specifically – assuming, perhaps optimistically, that he won’t appear on a ballot again – than it is for the Republican party, which will have to answer for the mess he’s made in next year’s midterms and beyond. And one of the challenges they seem likely to face is a changed public opinion landscape on immigration – a strength that Trump’s barbarism, just as in his first term, seems to be turning into a liability.
While it remains his strongest issue, polls have shown the public’s confidence in Trump on immigration declining steadily since January – averages suggest the public is newly and evenly split on his handling of it and some polls taken around the 100-day mark even found an outright majority of Americans disapproving. It’s no mystery why. The shock-and-awe campaign the administration is waging against immigrants legal and not has produced a steady stream of headlines that sound awful to all but Stephen Miller and the nativist fanatics driving Trump’s agenda. The deportation of a four-year-old citizen suffering from a rare form of cancer. The end of temporary protected status for 9,000 Afghan refugees even as the administration welcomes Afrikaners supposedly fleeing “white genocide”, a myth most voters who don’t frequent white supremacist forums are probably unfamiliar with. The use of the immigration enforcement apparatus to pursue and persecute critics of Israel’s war in Gaza. Even as voters succumbed to a panic over the migrant surge under Biden, moves like this under Trump and a public backlash to them were inevitable.
Osita Nwanevu is a Guardian US columnist
