Why Isn’t Trump (Even) Less Popular?

There are two reasons.

Donald Trump has been the leader of the Republican party for a decade, but he has never been a popular figure. His approval struggled to reach 50% at the beginning of his second term; in contrast Obama’s approval in Gallup’s tracker topped out at 69% early in his presidency, while Biden’s hit 57%. Trump’s current polls are even more dismal; his average in the fiftyplusone tracker is now 19 points underwater at around 38.8%.

Those are dreadful numbers. But they still mean that more than a third of US voters approve of the job Trump is doing—even as the US bleeds jobs, even as Trump’s gestapo ICE/CBP militia terrorizes cities, even as ACA premiums spike, even as Trump sends us into a pointless war with Iran, even as he spews hateful, nonsensical gibberish every time he speaks in public, even as he plumbs new depths of open disgusting racism, even as he declares his intention of ending free and fair elections, even as he is credibly accused of raping a child, even as he assaults the Constitution on an hourly basis.

It is hard to imagine how Trump could make it clearer that he is a belligerent, narcissistic, ignorant, erratic, criminal bully, utterly unfit for the office of president of the United States. How on earth can anyone, much less literally millions of anyones, still support him?

It is shocking that Trump retains significant support; it is shocking that this blowhard, fool, violent adjudicated sexual assaulter, and fascist was elected to the most powerful office on earth not once, but twice.

But “shocking” does not mean “inexplicable.” There are two straightforward, intertwined reasons that Trump has managed to maintain as much support as he has. The first is that fascism in the US has long had a significant constituency. The second is that partisanship is a powerful force.

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Fascism has a constituency

Trump critics often frame Trump and Trumpism as an aberration. Or, as former President Joe Biden put it in 2025, reacting to one of many Trump grotesqueries, “That’s not who we are. We’re about freedom, democracy, opportunity…”

This is a noble sentiment. But, obviously, it’s not true. The United States has sometimes, in its better moments, been about freedom, democracy, and opportunity. There are worse moments as well, though. The United States obtained its territory, its resources, and its wealth through dispossession and genocide of native people. It built much of its capital through the exploitation, torture, and dispossession of enslaved people. After the Civil War, it established a vast system of apartheid which lasted for a century. Abroad, the US engaged or enabled a long string of bloody imperial atrocities, from Vietnam to Iraq, including outright genocides in Indonesia, in Cambodia, and most recently, under Joe Biden himself, in Gaza.

These extended, repeated, and really continuous acts of horror cannot be dismissed as aberrations or as brief detours in the US path towards greater and greater equality and freedom—not least because US imperialism has in many ways become more extreme and more terrifying over time, not less, as America has grown in power. They are not blips in a teleological narrative of progress, but are instead their own tradition of racist brutality, also known as fascism.

This authoritarian suppression of and extermination of non-white people has not always been overwhelmingly popular. But throughout US history it has had at least significant minority approval. Internment of non-citizen Japanese-Americans in concentration camp during World War II, for example, had 93% support; internment of Japanese-Americans who were US citizen was supported by 59% of the public. The Iraq War—a war of aggression built on transparent lies and racist propaganda—won 55% to 68% US public approval.

Starkly put, the US throughout its history—from George Washington’s genocide of the Iroquois to Elon Musk’s genocidal withholding of global aid—has committed violent acts in order to enforce white supremacy. It has done so not (just) because its rulers approve of violent white supremacy, but because the people who choose those rulers also approve of, or at least tolerate, violent white supremacy.

Trump is a uniquely evil president; he is, I think, at this point indisputably the most evil president we have ever had, and that is a very high bar. But he is also the ugly and miserable end point of an ugly and miserable tradition. His schemes to resegregate the federal government and civil society hark back to Jim Crow; his mass deportations echo Eisenhower’s racist anti-Mexican crusade; the Iran War feels like an even more mendacious and ill-planned Iraq War, and on and on.

There has long been significant US public support, and even enthusiasm, for white supremacy. The people who embrace Trump now are the heirs of those who, in the past, fought for the Confederacy, violently overthrew democratically elected Reconstruction governments, pushed to accelerate native removal, demonized Vietnam War protestors, urged US support for South African apartheid and Israeli apartheid.

Fascism had a constituency then and it has a constituency now. Many people support Trump’s American fascism because fascism to many people is what America is about and what they want America to be about.

Partisanship is a powerful force

Trump is a fascist, but he’s also an erratic weirdo loser who embraces a range of bizarre and unpopular positions. He’s obsessed with tariffs, which he seems to think are magic tools for making America great even as he doesn’t really understand how they work. He demolished the East Wing of the White House to put in a vanity golden ballroom. He stole classified documents either to make a profit from them or just because. He has been held liable for a horrific sexual assault, and is accused of numerous others.

Even people who support fascism, you’d think, might be put off by Trump’s incompetence and self-aggrandizement. Sure, you might approve of fascist militias brutalizing your neighbors, but that doesn’t mean you necessarily want your business gutted by random Trump taxes. Why don’t the fascists just find some other, more focused, less ignorant fascist to advance their agenda of hate and violence? After all, Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz, J.D. Vance, Marco Rubio, Tucker Carlson and more would be happy enough to take Trump’s place.

Politics, though, isn’t just about policies; it’s about parties. Partisan identity is a powerful driver of voting turnout and of voter behavior. In what political scientists Achens and Bartels call the “folk theory” of democracy, rational voters seek out parties which fit their beliefs most closely. But researchers now believe that the reality is almost the opposite; for the most part, people’s partisan identities drive their beliefs. And partisan identities are tied closely to the leader of the party, who becomes a rallying point and a symbol, commanding loyalty, enthusiasm, and even sometimes reverence in their own person, in at least partial distinction from the policies they support.

You can see this in the stunning Republican reversal on support for Russia. The GOP before Trump saw Putin as a dangerous authoritarian and global rival. But Putin offered Trump illegal election help, and in return Trump has praised his fellow dictator and worked to shut off aid to Ukraine, which Putin invaded in 2022. Led by Trump, GOP elites have largely abandoned opposition to Russia, while rank and file Republicans have tossed aside their initial positive feelings for Ukraine.

Partisans don’t just seek out and adjust their views to complement those of partisan leaders. They also actively align themselves in opposition to their partisan enemies. Once Trump became the leader of the GOP, he benefited mightily from this kind of negative partisanship. Even Republicans who hated Trump would knee-jerk defend him when Democrats criticized him.

This is the dynamic which allowed Trump to raise $53 million on the day after his felony conviction. You’d think that an indictment would lead the GOP to look for another candidate. But instead Trump was able to present himself as the target of a Democratic administration—and negative partisanship means that Republicans rush to support whoever Democrats attack. “Yes Trump is bad but how dare Democrats say so” is logically incoherent but has powerful emotional resonance.

Partisanship affects Democrats too—and yes, it affects anti-Democratic partisans on the left as well. Trump’s narcissism has allowed him to use partisan forces as especially effective weapons though because he himself is a selfish narcissist who is utterly indifferent to the fate of the Republican party and its policies.

Joe Biden was eventually persuaded not to run in 2024 because he wanted the Democratic party and its values to prevail. Trump doesn’t care, which means that he can credibly threaten to use the partisan loyalty of his voters to tear the GOP apart if anyone challenges or defies him. That means that party leaders are very wary of defying him for any reason—which signals to party voters that Trump is still their guy.

What about media? Billionaires? Education?

There are a range of competing explanations which many people float to explain Trump’s support. Social media is a common scapegoat; so is billionaire purchase of media; so is a supposedly failing educational system. The common denominator here is that belief that those who approve of Trump are brainwashed or ignorant rather than evil.

I don’t want to dismiss these arguments altogether. But I think these factors primarily build upon, rather than cause, support for fascism and partisan dynamics. Again, the US has embraced fascist, white supremacist violence as long as there has been a US; social media did not invent Jim Crow.

Similarly, partisanship is a (you could say “the”) major factor in politics in just about every democracy; the US is not an outlier. Nor is partisanship always an evil in itself; partisan opposition to fascism is good and right and is an important way to build opposition and defeat fascists at the ballot box. To the extent that social media helps build partisan resistance to fascism, that’s a good thing.

Fox News certainly encourages its viewers to follow Trump blindly and to hate extravagantly. I don’t think it invented support for fascism, though, nor did it create partisanship out of whole cloth. Rather, Fox’s lineup is an example of how fascism and partisanship interact and how they can be used to build on and reinforce each other. The GOP over the last sixty years has become more and more the partisan voice of white supremacy. That means that voters who approve of fascism tend to adopt and lean into partisan Republican identity; at the same time, Republicans are called by their partisan identity to fascism.

Trump’s cult of personality is the result of an authoritarian ideology intertwining with partisan incentives. American fascist traditions and partisan enthusiasms can’t entirely offset Trump’s incompetence, cruelty, selfishness, and wholesale destruction of the country. But they set a floor to how unpopular he can become.

Whether that floor is 38%, 33%, or 25% we don’t know. Given Trump’s policy of war, immiseration, skyrocketing prices, and general misery, though, we may well find out.