Trump’s executive orders are not exactly crowd-pleasers
Polling suggests skepticism about the president’s plans, including about actions he’s already taken.
It is invariably the case that a winning political candidate casts his success as a stamp of approval for his campaign promises. Particularly in a political system dominated by two parties, this is misguided; voters are identifying the more palatable slate of proposals (when they’re not simply voting along party lines in the first place). It’s dishonest to suggest that every voter agreed with every proposal. But it’s politically useful, as it suggests that disagreement with those proposals is a rejection of the will of the people.
President Donald Trump has been unusually insistent that his victory in November reflects robust public support. Last year’s contest certainly offered the president more positive feedback than the two prior cycles, when he received fewer votes than his opponent. The extent of his “mandate,” though, is tempered both by the narrowness of his popular-vote victory and by the extent to which he benefited from international anti-incumbent trends.
Before this week, discussions of Trump’s mandate were rather academic. Prior to Trump’s inauguration, it didn’t matter much whether Americans did or didn’t support the things he said he was going to do. In the hours after his return to the White House, though, Trump began putting his campaign promises into effect — including ones that are unpopular even among many Republicans.
The most obvious example was his decision to immediately extend pardons and commutations to those involved in planning or participating in the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Recent polls show that less than half of the country approves of this. Among Republicans, support is higher — but in polling conducted for CBS News and NPR-PBS NewsHour, 3 in 10 Republicans opposed the idea.
The Wall Street Journal’s poll also asked an alternate version of the question: Would you support Jan. 6 pardons if they excluded those who physically attacked police? A higher percentage said yes — meaning support for the action Trump actually took is lower than it otherwise would have been.
Nuance generally shifts responses in polling, which is one reason appeals to the broad popularity of vague policy proposals generally fail to capture the diminished popularity of policies that include specifics.
Consider Trump’s plan to deport immigrants who entered the country illegally (and maybe some who didn’t). Across a number of polls (including the three above and one conducted for the New York Times), the idea of conducting broad deportations yields more support than opposition — but introduce specifics, and that support erodes significantly.
The most popular iteration is deporting those who live in the country illegally and have criminal records, an idea backed by most respondents in both the Times and Journal polls. Support for deporting all immigrants living here illegally sinks to just over a majority.
Even those proposals are vague; does someone who entered illegally but is awaiting an asylum determination count? With even more specifics, support falls further. In the Journal poll, fewer than half of respondents indicated that millions of deportations should occur if worker shortages would result (as they almost certainly would). Relatively few support deporting immigrants with citizen children or who have been upstanding, long-term U.S. residents.
The most popular option in the Journal poll? Creating a pathway to citizenship for that latter group.
The question about the children of immigrants broaches another subject addressed in Trump’s first-day executive orders. Children born in America are U.S. citizens even if their parents weren’t, as enshrined in the 14th Amendment. Trump hopes to restrict how that applies, an idea that earns the support of only 4 in 10 Americans in the Times poll and only 3 in 10 in the CBS News one. There are slight wording differences (the CBS poll, for example, proposes adding “other citizenship requirements”), but in each case, the idea is more unpopular than not.
Trump’s campaign promise to impose tariffs on imported goods wasn’t implemented on his first day in office, though the president did hint that such levies were imminent. This is not a popular idea, with fewer than half of respondents approving in the CBS, Journal and Times polls. In a poll conducted for USA Today, in fact, 1 in 10 respondents said introducing tariffs was the main thing they didn’t want Trump to do. (Nearly a quarter identified the issuance of pardons to the Capitol rioters as the No. 1 thing they didn’t want Trump to do.) That many people fervently oppose tariffs, it seems safe to assume, because they understand prices would rise as a result. About two-thirds of respondents in both the Journal and CBS polls held that view.
Other Day 1 decisions and longer-term policy proposals were evaluated in those polls, too. For example:
- Respondents in the Times poll were about evenly split on ending government diversity programs (as one executive order mandates). In the CBS poll, two-thirds suggested Trump should either expand those efforts or not get involved.
- In the Journal poll, respondents were divided on whether Trump should “ease regulations for drilling for oil and natural gas on federal public lands.”
- In that same poll, there was little support for firing career civil servants and replacing them with people loyal to the president (a possibility toward which Trump took initial steps on Monday).
- Very few respondents in the CBS and Times polls thought Trump should launch investigations into his political opponents.
It should not come as a surprise that opinions on many of these subjects are evenly divided. After all, so was the electorate in November, with Trump earning fewer than half of the votes cast. Trump has the power to sign executive orders, but those orders reflect his will and (largely) the will of the Republican base. His actions are not reflective of broad public support, much less broad support for those specific actions. In fact, his executive orders, particularly the less popular ones, have the effect of eroding his political capital — a limited resource that he depletes with each reference to his “mandate.”
There’s one last useful question from the Journal poll that bears mentioning. It asked respondents which came closer to their view: that voters gave Trump a mandate to govern as he sees fit or that Congress has a duty to check Trump’s power.
By more than a 2 to 1 margin, respondents chose the latter option.