Donald Trump is becoming Joe Biden version 2.0
In the year since Democrats lost the 2024 election, as Donald Trump defeated then-President Biden in all seven swing states, they have struggled to admit exactly what went wrong.
It wasn’t a thing. For starters, Biden aged precipitously in the last two years of his presidency, often leading to moments that seemed to worry voters more than those closest to Biden and the Democrats in leadership, who insisted he was in perfect health.
Then several problems arose of their own making. Biden’s decision to end Trump’s Remain in Mexico immigration policy has opened our borders to millions of asylum seekers without the necessary resources, sparking resentment and fear in cities and towns across the country as a new population explosion crushes them.
Democrats’ soft-on-crime policies in cities like San Francisco, Chicago, and Portland—from ending cash bail to sentencing reform and defunding police rhetoric—have undoubtedly made voters less safe and resulted in the ouster of many Democratic mayors and district attorneys for failing their cities.
Other problems are inherited or unexpected, such as the post-Covid economy and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, respectively.
But the bigger problem was that Democrats seemed totally out of touch with Americans’ problems. Even though voters kept telling them they were concerned about the economy, crime and immigration, Democrats looked them straight in the eye and said: the economy is strong as hell, crime is down and immigration is not a crisis.
It was a recipe for disaster, and disaster they had. Republicans now control the courts, the House, the Senate and the White House, and Trump has been given a second chance to destroy our democracy.
Today, a year before the midterm elections that will tell the Republicans and Trump quite definitively what voters think of them, the situation appears to be reversed.
Trump’s obvious cognitive and physical decline — falling asleep during Cabinet meetings, rambling incoherently during news conferences, unexplained medical problems — should worry Republicans and Trump’s entourage.
Then there are the problems that are of the Republicans and Trump themselves. His definitively stupid tariffs made the cost of goods more expensive, the cost of doing business more expensive, and unemployment increased. Even as they try to reduce tariffs, the uncertainty it has created has led to less foreign investment in the United States, which has trickled down to consumers.
Likewise, Trump’s failure to produce the Epstein files, as he had promised, divided MAGA influencers and frustrated his base; Sloppy and ineffective DOGE cuts seemed non-strategic and unnecessary; the longest government shutdown in history seemed unnecessarily punitive; and Trump’s foreign adventures — threatening war with Venezuela, hitting Iran’s nuclear weapons, bailing out Argentina — looked like anything but America First.
But worst of all, Trump is making Biden’s fatal mistake. He tells voters they are wrong about how they feel.
Polls show Trump has an abysmal 36% approval rating in the latest Gallup poll, a new low for his second term. And more worryingly, a CNN/SSRS poll last month found that 61 percent of Americans believe Trump’s policies “have made economic conditions in this country worse.” Voters, including many of them, place the blame squarely on him.
Trump’s baffling and dangerous response was to tell them that affordability – the issue they care about most – is a “hoax,” a “scam,” and a Democratic “scam.”
At last week’s Cabinet meeting, he sounded a lot like Biden when he insisted, “Our country is rich and secure again.”
His surrogates also ignore voters’ concerns. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on a Sunday broadcast, “The economy has been better than we thought” and “I think next year we’re going to move into prosperity.”
President Mike Johnson said everyone should “relax.”
“We are exactly on the trajectory we always planned to be. Safe driving, everyone, everything will be fine. Our best days are ahead of us. Americans are going to feel a lot better early next year.”
But the start of next year is fast approaching. The same goes for the midterm elections. If Johnson isn’t worried, his members certainly are. And they are beginning to speak openly about the party’s failure to refine its message.
“If we don’t do it, we’d be idiots, because people are really concerned about the economy,” Rep. Tony Gonzales said.
Other lawmakers worry that this isn’t just a messaging problem, but a political problem, and they’re right.
But Trump seems either oblivious to the pain or indifferent to it. And he repeats all the mistakes made by the Democrats in 2024. If the Republicans do not change the situation, and quickly, they will surely suffer the same fate.
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