President Trump and his crew may appear oblivious to the growing sense of discomfort and fear among voters about the administration’s excesses, but there was a clear sign on Thursday that his team is well aware the first two months of his term are not playing well outside the MAGA cave.
The decision to drop Representative Elise Stefanik’s nomination as ambassador to the United Nations could not have been an easy one for a White House that is loath to acknowledge any misstep, and it was clearly a humiliation for Stefanik. She had already begun a social-media farewell retrospective for her upstate New York district and stepped down from a leadership position, and as recently as Wednesday she posted a photo of herself with people she presumptuously called her “cabinet colleagues.”
But all her fawning subservience to the Trump agenda went for naught. “There are others that can do a good job at the United Nations,” Trump wrote on his social media platform, demonstrating yet again that loyalty to his cause is easily disregarded when there are more pressing and self-serving matters at stake.
The decision to eject Stefanik from the bus was due not just to House Republicans’ needing her vote in the next few weeks, however. If that were the case, Trump could have kept her in the House until after the budget reconciliation votes this spring and then sent her to the U.N.
Instead, it was most likely because Republicans knew they might struggle to keep her congressional seat in a special election. The warning signs are everywhere: As Nate Cohn of The Times wrote Friday morning, Trump has already blown his post-election honeymoon; more Americans disapprove of his performance than approve of it. A Democrat flipped an Iowa State Senate seat in January, and in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, another Democrat startled the political world by winning a State Senate district that Trump took by 15 points last November. Politico reports that Republicans are worried about an upcoming special congressional election in a deep-red Florida district.
It’s not that voters are suddenly drawn to the Democratic Party, which has yet to coalesce around a message or even a strategy. But as a series of raucous town halls around the country have demonstrated, voters are both angered and disillusioned by the administration’s early priorities. There are dozens of possible reasons: Consumer prices have yet to go down, and Trump’s inexplicable love of tariffs is likely to push them up further. The stock market has sunk, along with the retirement savings of many voters, and the White House seems unperturbed by the prospect of a recession. The administration is doing real damage to middle-class foundations like Social Security, and red states will pay the heaviest price.
Most voters simply want competence from public officials, and the gross negligence shown by the use of their phones to discuss war plans demonstrates the opposite. They want changes in their lives, not changes to the exhibits at the Smithsonian. They aren’t getting that, and Stefanik is one of the first to pay a price for it. There will be many others.
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