Ross Douthat says Donald Trump has lost America after year in office

This is not a current situation. It’s not like any horrific new information has come to light in recent days about the President of the United States.

(Although I don’t think he helped himself by posting the image of the Obamas as monkeys and refusing to apologize.)

I started thinking about this after some comments from Ross Douthat, the moderately conservative New York Times columnist who is, shall we say, a frequent critic of Donald Trump.

“I want to tell you a secret,” Douthat says in the video. Well, that sounds exciting.

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Center-right New York Times columnist Ross Douthat says President Donald Trump has “lost the country.” (Al Drago/Getty Images)

“A situation most conservatives on the Internet don’t want you to know about. A year into his second presidency, Donald Trump has lost the country.”

Is this true?

He’s not just saying that Democrats are going to crush the Republican Party in the midterms the same way the Seattle Seahawks annihilated the New England Patriots in the Super Bowl.

It airs clips of experts analyzing the latest polls, like Trump with a 37% approval rating, and a majority of Americans saying the country is worse off than a year ago.

But is this a rarefied view of the Acela Corridor intelligentsia that does not reflect the silent majority, a term popularized by Richard Nixon and which Trump has now adopted?

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Let Douthat make his point: “And all of this was predictable. From the early days of DOGE to the Minneapolis debacle, the Trump administration has always governed as if swing voters weren’t part of its coalition. And now, guess what? That’s not the case.”

Allow me to issue a few caveats:

Donald Trump has been declared politically dead with astonishing regularity over the past decade. After his comments in “Access Hollywood” about having his way with women. After hush money was paid to Stormy Daniels. And even by most of his fellow Republicans after the January 6 riot at the Capitol.

Not to mention the four indictments, with one conviction, which undoubtedly ended up helping Trump because they were considered exaggerated.

How many political geniuses thought at the time that Trump could come back to win a second term?

Few members of the political intelligentsia were truly prepared for Trump’s return. (Saul Loeb/Piscine via REUTERS)

And while I recognize that Democrats have strong winds at their backs heading into the midterm elections, there are still nine months and many unknown variables, particularly the state of the economy in the wake of Trump’s tariffs.

Additionally, Trump’s controversial governing style has always focused on his MAGA base, while stubbornly denouncing Democratic leaders (Tim Walz is “seriously r——d”), their cities (Baltimore is “hell”), and claiming that Somalis are “trash” and should be sent home.

“But here’s the thing,” Douthat says. “It’s not moderates and undecided voters who lose when the Trump administration becomes unpopular. It’s people on the right. People like me, and certainly people further to my right, who support many of the things the Trump administration has tried to do, from securing the border to pressuring American institutions to become more ideologically diverse to resetting and rolling back the DEI. All of this, this whole agenda will disappear if the Republican Party doesn’t get its way. not to win the elections.”

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After offering various explanations, I have to say that I think Ross Douthat is right.

We went through a period in which the president kidnapped the leader of Venezuela (although Nicolás Maduro was a crooked thug), threatened to take over Greenland, alienated Canada with his speech about the 51st state, abolished the East Wing, ordered his name engraved on the Kennedy Center, and presided over a 43-day government shutdown, the longest in American history.

And he remains dogged by the Jeffrey Epstein files, even though I would argue that the documents confirm that he did not personally engage in sexual misconduct.

Trump has also made no effort to hide his campaign of retaliation against his political enemies, even though such attempts have often been rebuffed by the courts (such as a judge dismissing charges against Jim Comey and Letitia James).

The Jeffrey Epstein files are an ongoing problem for the president. (Davidoff Studios/Getty Images)

I think it’s something even more visceral than that.

ICE’s terrible excesses have fueled a backlash against federal forces implementing Trump’s campaign’s signature theme, a program of mass deportations. And the violence directed against these officers is of course reprehensible.

Yet every other day, Americans hear about, or watch phone videos of, ICE arresting a 5-year-old boy, ICE dragging a man in his underwear through the snow before bringing him back, ICE pulling U.S. citizens from their cars, ICE smashing a car window after learning a month-old baby was in the backseat, covering the child with shards of glass.

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DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told me in a podcast video interview that she stands by her comments that Renee Good was a domestic terrorist.

But it was the murder of Good, who had just dropped her child off at school, and especially Alex Pretti, an intensive care nurse working with veterans, that really shook the country and made Minneapolis look like a war zone.

The president toned down his rhetoric, saying ICE should have used a “softer touch,” expressing sympathy for dead Americans and beginning a partial withdrawal from Minnesota.

Sometimes an accumulation of problems reaches a critical point, a point that grabs people by the throat and doesn’t let go, inflicting lasting damage.

The murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti turned Minneapolis into an effective war zone. (Stefani Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

So has Trump lost the country? It’s complicated.

The tipping point question easily becomes shorthand for all the other attributes people don’t like in a politician. The economy really isn’t that bad, with an unemployment rate of 4.4 percent, but many Americans believe they’re worse off.

ICE’s sometimes brutal tactics, supposedly targeting illegal immigrants and the so-called “worst of the worst,” are increasingly being used against U.S. citizens.

Fewer than 14 percent of the nearly 400,000 immigrants arrested by ICE in the past year were charged or convicted of violent criminal offenses, according to an internal Homeland Security document obtained by CBS.

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And then there are the children caught in this web. According to a lawsuit, 18-month-old Amelia was rushed to the hospital with life-threatening respiratory failure and then sent back to a Texas detention center, where she was allegedly denied daily medications prescribed by doctors. As the child struggled to breathe, “she was on the verge of death,” an immigrant rights advocate at Columbia Law School said, according to NBC. (Amelia was released after the complaint was filed.)

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I would never rule out Trump’s ability to bounce back. But the anguish over ICE and the attacks on this country’s citizens have left an indelible scar on his presidency.