Republicans who minimize U.S. President Donald Trump’s sliding job approval ratings typically emphasize that his agenda contains many popular policies. Those arguments misunderstand what makes for successful political leadership.
Even though some White House policies are popular, policy is but one leg of the three-legged stool of political leadership. Rhetoric also matters. So, too, does implementation, especially at the executive level. Without its full complement of limbs, this three-legged stool is prone to tip over and shatter.
“Communication about public policy is as important as the public policy itself,” Jeffrey Brauer, a political scientist at Keystone College, near Scranton, Pennsylvania, told me. “This is something many political leaders in the U.S. on both sides of the aisle often forget or often don’t realize in the first place.” How a policy is carried out, Brauer added, impacts voters’ “perception of policy success.”
“This explains the wide gap between the initial, extensive support of the administration’s immigration policy and the current major downturn in the polls,” he said. “Most Americans don’t agree with the implementation, particularly with the tactics being used.” About that.
Trump’s most potent political asset has almost always been immigration. During the 2016 campaign, the president vowed to secure the Mexican border. He delivered. After illegal immigration spiked under President Joe Biden, voters turned to Trump (again) to address the problem. Aside from their frustration with inflation, voters picked the 45th president over Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, the sitting vice president, and made him the 47th president, because they saw border security as a serious problem and trusted him to stem illegal immigration and deport criminal aliens.
In the year since Trump’s return to the White House, his administration has overseen a dramatic drop in illegal border crossings from Mexico and undertaken a massive deportation program to repatriate criminal aliens. And yet as of this week, Trump’s job approval rating on immigration is 8 percentage points underwater in the RealClearPolitics average of recent surveys (44.4 percent positive, 52.4 percent negative). What happened? Rhetoric and tactics; that’s what happened. That’s what’s still happening.
The polling shows voters have soured on Trump’s immigration agenda, broadly speaking, because of the aggressive tactics wielded by the Department of Homeland Security. One example: American citizens who are Hispanic (and haven’t committed any crime, not that that should matter) have been forced to “ show their papers ” — in other words: produce proof of citizenship or risk arrest and detention by federal authorities. Another example: The constitutionally questionable and violently belligerent behavior of Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minneapolis, to say nothing of the shooting deaths of Twin Cities protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
Then there’s the third leg of the stool: rhetoric.
Although the president belatedly called the Good and Pretti killings tragic and has now said so more than once, he continues to step on that message by denigrating these two dead Americans and subtly suggesting the shootings, though unfortunate, were understandable, if not justified. “He was not an angel, and she was not an angel,” Trump told NBC News in an interview. It’s this attitude that now has voters who supported the president’s immigration enforcement agenda reevaluating.
And to be clear: When Trump’s job approval ratings on immigration flip upside down in the course of a year, from plus-8 points in January of 2025 to negative-8 points today, that’s evidence of voters doing some major reevaluating.
Source: Korea Times News
