Trump’s policy mayhem is making even the Maga faithful consider walking away

The political consequences of Donald Trump’s policy mayhem are now coming into view: “Maga” America is getting pissed.It has been a sight to see how every one of the president’s policy initiatives has sabotaged some core constituency or other. From farmers and rural Americans to manufacturing workers and every American struggling to make ends meet, Trump has torched pretty much his entire political base. For all his efforts to rig the midterm elections in his favor, it’s as if he is daring the Maga faithful to drop him.And now, according to the most recent survey by Harris for the Guardian, even voters who identify as foot soldiers of the president’s political army are becoming impatient with the state of affairs, increasingly willing to blame the government for their economic troubles.About 56% of respondents who identified as members of the Maga coalition said they were either having trouble meeting their debt payments or worried they would be struggling soon. The same share admitted similar troubles meeting housing payments. 57% said the same about affording healthcare costs. 58% claimed the same about their utility bills, 61% about affording groceries, 63% about paying for gas.Many of these stressors stem from Trump’s policy preferences. Trump’s decision to end government subsidies is largely at fault for the rising cost of health insurance. The rise in energy costs and rebound of inflation since March are direct consequences of Iran’s throttling of the Strait of Hormuz. Resurgent inflation interrupted the Federal Reserve’s campaign to ease monetary policy and interrupted the gradual decline in mortgage rates. Manufacturers have culled nearly 100,000 jobs since Trump took office, in part due to Trump’s tariffs. Farmers have been whacked by higher costs of energy, fertilizer and machinery.Rural Americans voted for Trump by a margin of 40 percentage points in November of 2024. According to the Harris poll for the Guardian, 49% of them now say their personal financial security is getting worse. That is even more than the 42% of Americans in rural areas who claimed their personal finances were deteriorating in the Harris poll taken in April last year, a few weeks after “liberation day”, when Trump imposed tariffs on everybody and sent financial markets around the world into a tailspin.Similarly, in the latest poll, 45% of Americans with less than a four-year college degree reported a worsening financial situation, up from 42% in April of 2025.These constituencies are at the core of the Maga movement. And they are losing patience with the justifications for Trump’s destructive policies: 54% of Maga faithful think the government is the most responsible for the rising prices of goods and services. Contrary to the repeated claims from the White House, 41% of them believe economists’ observation that American consumers bear most of the costs of Trump’s tariffs. Only 31% buy Trump’s argument that foreigners pick up the tab.Maga voters have not abandoned the president. By recent counts, 62% of rank-and-file Republicans identify as Maga, up from only 38% in September of 2022. 57% of them trust that the government considers the affordability crisis a top priority. And 69% believe the government is capable of fixing it. Still, misgivings are creeping in: just over a third of Maga faithful think the government has made it worse.Beyond the growing angst among Trump’s most loyal followers, what should most worry the president is the brewing discontent outside the borders of his base, which is still a minority of the overall electorate. If Maga Republicans are finding themselves at odds with their leader, other voters – including many Republicans – have an even more jaundiced view of his endeavors.The share of Republicans – Maga or not – who believe the economy is getting worse hit 38% in the latest Harris poll, up from 33% of Republicans surveyed in April last year. The share of Republicans who think the economy is getting better declined from a year ago, from 31% to 27%. The opinion of independent voters is probably the best barometer of where the electorate, on average, will land in the fall. Forty-four per cent think their financial security is deteriorating, almost three times the share who believe it is getting better.In July, just four months before the midterm elections, these signs of voter discontent all the way through to Trump’s core partisans might presage a devastating Blue Wave to dramatically reconfigure the political profile of Congress. And yet, for all the damage caused by Trump’s policies on the American people, Americans are not quite convinced that Democrats would do any better.Among Americans who feel stressed by an affordability crisis, only 26% think Democrats can fix it, just a tad more than the 25% who think Republicans can do it. 36% think neither is up to the task. Americans’ may have lost patience with Trump’s destructive politics. But Democrats have not made an attractive counteroffer. They remain, it seems, hobbled by the memory of their economic mismanagement when inflation rebounded during the Biden administration.And that leaves American politics in an ambiguous place – shaped by voters who are losing patience with Trump’s whimsical policy grab bag and yet unwilling to give Democrats the benefit of the doubt. This suggests Democrats have an enormous opportunity to put forth an economic strategy that might undo some of the pain caused by the current administration. Hopefully, they can figure out what that is.