Republicans who minimize President Donald Trump’s sliding job approval ratings typically emphasize that his agenda contains many popular policies. Those arguments misunderstand what makes for successful political leadership.
Even though some White House policies are popular, policy is but one leg of the three-legged stool of political leadership. Rhetoric also matters. So, too, does implementation, especially at the executive level. Without its full complement of limbs, this three-legged stool is prone to tip over and shatter.
“Communication about public policy is as important as the public policy itself,” Jeffrey Brauer, a political scientist at Keystone College, near Scranton, Pennsylvania, told me. “This is something many political leaders in the U.S. on both sides of the aisle often forget or often don’t realize in the first place.” How a policy is carried out, Brauer added, impacts voters’ “perception of policy success.”
“This explains the wide gap between the initial, extensive support of the administration’s immigration policy and the current major downturn in the polls,” he said. “Most Americans don’t agree with the implementation, particularly with the tactics being used.”
About that. Trump’s most potent political asset has almost always been immigration. During the 2016 campaign, the president vowed to secure the Mexican border. He delivered. After illegal immigration spiked under President Joe Biden, voters turned to Trump (again) to address the problem. Aside from their frustration with inflation, voters picked the 45th president over Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, the sitting vice president, and made him the 47th president, because they saw border security as a serious problem and trusted him to stem illegal immigration and deport criminal aliens.
In the year since Trump’s return to the White House, his administration has overseen a dramatic drop in illegal border crossings from Mexico and undertaken a massive deportation program to repatriate criminal aliens. And yet as of this week, Trump’s job approval rating on immigration is 8 percentage points underwater in the RealClearPolitics average of recent surveys (44.4% positive, 52.4% negative). What happened? Rhetoric and tactics; that’s what happened. That’s what’s still happening.
The polling shows voters have soured on Trump’s immigration agenda, broadly speaking, because of the aggressive tactics wielded by the Department of Homeland Security. One example: American citizens who are Hispanic (and haven’t committed any crime, not that that should matter) have been forced to “ show their papers ” — in other words: produce proof of citizenship or risk arrest and detention by federal authorities. Another example: The constitutionally questionable and violently belligerent behavior of Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minneapolis, to say nothing of the shooting deaths of Twin Cities protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
Then there’s the third leg of the stool: rhetoric.
Although the president belatedly called the Good and Pretti killings tragic and has now said so more than once, he continues to step on that message by denigrating these two dead Americans and subtly suggesting the shootings, though unfortunate, were understandable, if not justified. “He was not an angel, and she was not an angel,” Trump told NBC News in an interview. It’s this attitude that now has voters who supported the president’s immigration enforcement agenda reevaluating.
And to be clear: When Trump’s job approval ratings on immigration flip upside down in the course of a year, from plus-8 points in January of 2025 to negative-8 points today, that’s evidence of voters doing some major reevaluating.
Which is why it doesn’t really matter that, as Republicans point out, a majority of voters “ prefer Trump’s immigration policies over Biden’s.” Voters aren’t comparing Trump to Biden. The 2024 election is long since over. They’re judging the current president on his policy, his implementation and his rhetoric — and find him lacking on two out of three.
“A majority of Americans want to deport undocumented criminals, and they want to deport undocumented people who came here during the Biden years. But not if that means murdering American citizens; scenes that look like kidnappings, stories about children ripped away from parents; cars left running in the street as people are snatched away,” said Brian Rosenwald, a scholar in residence at the Partnership for Effective Public Administration and Leadership Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania. “The cost is too high and flips public opinion on the issue.”
Trump and the Republicans are hardly alone in failing to understand the importance of the three-legged leadership stool. Recall President Barack Obama saying all of the right things after Russia forcibly annexed Crimea in what amounted to the first phase of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, yet declining to provide Kyiv weapons and ammunition to guard against further aggression from Moscow. It’s an interesting case of a politician getting the rhetoric right but blowing the policy. (Guess who did greenlight U.S. weapons for Ukraine. Trump, during his first presidency.)
Republicans can soothe themselves all they want with issue polling that shows voters would choose Trump over Biden (and Harris) on a given policy, be it immigration, the economy or anything else. It’s unlikely to matter one whit unless they get Trump and his lieutenants in the administration to make necessary adjustments to tactics and rhetoric.
But Democrats beware, particularly those eyeing a 2028 White House bid: Getting the rhetoric right won’t trick voters into backing a candidate whose policies they find unacceptable or insufficient. Oh, and there’s no such thing as getting the tactics right if the policy is wrong.
David M. Drucker is a columnist covering politics and policy. He is also a senior writer for The Dispatch and the author of “In Trump’s Shadow: The Battle for 2024 and the Future of the GOP.”
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