Trump and MAGA are getting crushed

Trump’s sports extravaganzas may make matters worse.

Donald Trump’s flurry of sporting event appearances topped off by his obscene and misogynistic-tainted UFC spectacle might not have been the way to conceal his physical and mental degeneration or resuscitate his sagging presidency. In struggling to fulfill his bloodlust and displaying his weird fascination with cartoonish male physiques, Trump wound up spotlighting the contrast between competitors’ vigor and his decrepitude.

(White House photo)

Regardless, as he struggles to remain awake, Trump is getting blown off the court of public opinion. His fan base has drifted away. Surveying a batch of polls, the New York Times reported that a majority of white, non-college educated voters disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy. The nosedive since the 2018 midterms — when he held a +30-point advantage with working-class white voters — to his current deficit, ranging from 14 to 30 points, confirms that he has lost his most loyal followers “on the year’s most pressing issue.” (It’s a good idea to check in now and then with those supposedly intractable Trump groupies in Rust Belt diners to see what they think now.)

Trump’s numbers across the board are horrid, but his collapse among independent voters is truly stunning. AP-NORC research shows that “while about half of independents without a college education had a positive view of Trump around the 2024 election,” only about a quarter did by this spring, PBS reported. The education gap disappeared, so independents now have “similarly negative views of the president regardless of their level of education.”

Likewise, PRRI’s poll of over 5,400 Americans confirms that Trump’s support has plunged among independents (down from 37 percent to 25 percent since last September) and even further (35 percent to 14 percent) among “true independents” (who don’t lean toward either party).

Trump’s biggest fumble may have been with Hispanic voters, thanks to his disastrous economy and cruel anti-immigrant onslaught. PRRI shows Hispanic support down from 39 percent in September 2024 to 23 percent, the lowest in five years. AP-NORC found Hispanic independent support cratering from 46 percent around the 2024 election to “as low as 15% during last fall’s government shutdown before landing around one-quarter in the spring.”

In the same vein, the UnidosUS Bipartisan Poll of Hispanic Voters found 67 percent of Hispanic voters nationally disapprove of Trump’s performance, and 66 percent think he and Republicans are not doing enough on the economy. (Even in deep-red Florida, where Republicans touted inroads with Hispanics in 2024, 20 percent of Hispanics who voted for him say they would not do so now.)

In sum, Trump’s lame stunts (e.g., sports outings, a self-congratulatory July 4 rally) designed to bolster his ego and distract Americans from his decrepit appearance and dismal job performance are not helping him. (And excessively frequent visits with a phalanx of doctors large enough to field their own offensive and defensive football squads just might reinforce the perception that he is falling apart.)

If you look at the reasons for voters’ economic angst, there’s an argument to be made that Trump’s vile displays of self-indulgence will make Republicans’ predicament worse. Behind the polling numbers is an inescapable economic reality. At the very time Americans are most stressed about making ends meet, they are confronted on a daily basis with evidence of Trump’s egregious self-enrichment and an ever-widening chasm between his uber-rich pals and everyone else.

The “stark juxtaposition” between, on one hand, the Bureau of Labor Statistics report that energy prices “had wiped out a year and a half of wage gains for the average American worker” and, on the other hand, Elon Musk’s emergence just days later as the first trillionaire helps explain “why many Americans, in survey after survey, say they no longer believe the U.S. economy is working for them,” the New York Times reported. (And if you want to add insult to injury: consider that Musk, the now-trillionaire, is the same person who slashed jobs and vital programs as DOGE chieftain. Could the glaring injustice of the current economic system be any more galling?)

Every new attack on Americans’ sense of economic security (e.g., skyrocketing gas prices, AI’s destabilizing influence on jobs, cuts to healthcare and SNAP, the tariff-induced decimation of the farm economy, millions priced out of coverage under the Affordable Care Act) deepens Americans’ sense of economic trauma and increases their conviction that the very few at the top are getting ahead at their expense.

Put differently, the economy is not working to generate broadly shared prosperity, the indispensable element in a stable democracy, when the Trump-Epstein-Musk class most obnoxiously manipulates government for their own benefit, laps up a nonstop flow of favors and tax breaks, and avoids even a modicum of social responsibility (More tax cuts! More pardons! No regulation!) while “entire generations of families worry they will never be able to afford to buy a house, raise children or enjoy a comfortable retirement.”

Only people as clueless and selfish as Trump, MAGA operatives, and the Epstein class could imagine that they can keep the masses at bay and themselves in power with the 21^st-century equivalent of Circus Maximus. It is easy to see why, then, Trump’s shenanigans may aggravate the threat to MAGA rule, not stave off its impending political reckoning.

In light of MAGA Republicans’ contempt for Americans’ financial pain, stomach-turning corruption, and embrace of a reverse-Robin Hood economy, it is unfathomable that Trump’s cringeworthy sports blitz could win back many voters. To the contrary, compulsively spending taxpayers’ money on himself (the UFC debauchery alone costing $60 million) might very well intensify hardworking voters’ disgust with the Epstein-Trump class and encourage voters to eject the MAGA team in November.

As for Democrats, there is a critical lesson here. Instead of buying post-2024 election hysterical punditry that the party has permanently lost white, non-college-educated voters, savvier Democrats stood their ground in fight after fight against MAGA villains, focused on affordability, denounced MAGA’s corruption racket, defended access to healthcare, and relentlessly condemned Trump for prioritizing oligarchs’ demands over ordinary voters’ needs. That’s how Democrats have begun to win back voters. And contrary to the imploring of white privileged commentators and “centrist” business interests paranoid about the “woke label”), Democrats did it without jettisoning racial justice, kicking LGBTQ+ Americans to the curb, or throwing migrants to the ICE wolves. Now they just need to stay in the game, channel voters’ sense of economic injustice/rage, and run through the tape in November.

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