Americans are usually an optimistic people – except when it comes to our country’s future.
Right-track/wrong-track surveys have long found yawning gaps favoring the dark view. The RealClearPolitics poll average, stretching back to 2009, reports no point with a positive majority but several where the spread was 40 or even 50 points to the negative.
When Donald Trump was sworn in last January, the wrong-track view held sway by 30 points. Followers of the news – which presents the president’s first months in office as a kleptocratic frenzy marked by destructive economic policies and naked assaults on the Constitution – would expect these numbers to have subsequently cracked the ocean’s bottom.
But, lo and behold, the wrong-track/right-track gap has shrunk to nine points. It’s still in negative territory, but that is the tightest gap since April 2021 (minus 6.5), when the COVID vaccine offered hope that we might return to normal. We did, in a way, as the gap quickly shot back up, peaking at minus 57 in July 2022.
The recent positive poll numbers are just a snapshot in time. They might change tomorrow. They do not reflect an algorithm’s assessment of thousands of firm data points but the fluid psychological state – the vibe, to take the Democrats’ once favorite phrase – of the people.
Still, the near-historic rise in optimism recorded by established polls is significant. It can also be a little confounding given Trump’s ridiculously harsh press coverage and the fact that material conditions have not dramatically improved during the last five months. Indeed, a key story of Trump’s second term is the difficulty he and the GOP Congress are having passing his agenda.
What’s driving the vibe shift?
America’s drive for innovation and the progressive domination of the intelligentsia have led us to judge presidencies by their forward-looking plans to get America on the right track. We remember what our leaders built. Trump’s secret sauce so far has been his focus on the other side of the equation – dismantling past actions that sent us down the wrong track. Trump may not be a classic conservative, but, like Ronald Reagan, much of his success at home has been rooted in subtraction rather than addition.
Trump is a reactionary in the best sense of the word. He has been more “undo” than “can do.” The Biden administration gave his wrecking ball plenty of targets.
His efforts to reverse the Biden administration’s embrace of open borders and its insistence that males be allowed to compete against women seek a return to the way things used to be.
His deployment of troops to quell the LA riots is not a strong man’s push to silence dissent but a commitment – lost in both the BLM riots of 2020 and the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol – to the principle that we should not express our political discontent through violence.
The same spirit informs his efforts to reform higher education. He is not trying to destroy Harvard, Columbia, and other elite schools. He is seeking to restore their pivotal role as safe spaces for the free exchange of ideas. His efforts to limit the number of foreign students – 25% of whom come from our main adversary, China – aim to reassert the basic point that even our private institutions should, on the whole, serve our country’s interests.
Yes, many Americans have concerns about how Trump is pursuing these aims. The devil is always in the details. But the shrunken right-track/wrong-track gap suggests the broad sense across the country that he is moving the country in the right direction by moving us off the wrong track.
Anecdotal evidence suggests that even some of his opponents are quietly pleased by some of his more controversial actions. I recently asked a very liberal friend who “fears and despises” Trump whether she supports his opposition to birthright citizenship. “I support the Constitution,” she replied. After telling her I wanted to wait for the Supreme Court to definitively answer that question, I asked her: “If we were writing the Constitution from scratch today, should we enshrine the idea that anybody born on our soil is automatically a citizen?”
“Of course not,” she said, without missing a beat.
Taking a step back, it seems fair to say she is not unhappy that he is asking the question. Likewise, she does not support his efforts to cut the federal government, but she is happy that he’s refocused attention on the deficit and debt.
The right-track/wrong-track numbers show that Americans have recognized that things were amiss in our nation’s capital. The vibe has shifted because of Trump’s willingness to challenge many assumptions of governance and sacred cows.
Will it last? Who knows. Getting us off the wrong track is a key first step; moving us on to the right track may be harder still.
