The PointConversations and insights about the moment.
Opinion Writer
And on the 1,175th day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the warring parties finally met for direct talks in Istanbul and … well, not much. On the fighting front, meanwhile, the Russians continued their inch-by-blood-soaked-inch advance, with no break in sight.
The meeting was preceded by a week of confusion and theatrics, much of it largely intended by each side to convince President Trump that the other was obstructing peace. In the end, low-level delegations from Russia and Ukraine met, for less than two hours, and agreed only on a prisoner swap.
That was more than nothing, which by the time they met seemed where they were headed, especially after Trump, who at one point suggested he might show up in Istanbul, effectively turned his back on the whole meeting. Still, the brouhaha served at least to demonstrate why Trump’s insistence on a cease-fire without addressing what the warring sides really want at this stage has not worked.
In the three months since Trump started his Ukraine peace efforts, both the Ukrainian and the Russian leaders, Volodymyr Zelensky and Vladimir Putin, have worked hard to persuade the mercurial American that they fully share his goal and that the other is the problem. Trump, for his part, has gone back and forth, bashing Zelensky in their infamous February meeting, but at times also scolding and threatening Putin.
The Istanbul imbroglio began last week with a phone call between Zelensky and Trump followed by their renewed call for a 30-day cease-fire — something Putin has made clear he is not interested in at this stage. Poland, Germany, France and Britain promptly joined in, adding the threat of more sanctions if Russia said no.
Putin then parried with a proposal of his own, to hold talks on Thursday in Istanbul. Trump enthusiastically approved, and even suggested that he might pop by. Zelensky promptly raised the bidding, saying he’d go himself and challenging Putin to do likewise. Zelensky went, Putin didn’t and instead sent a low-level team — “more like a sham level,” said the Ukrainian president before returning home.
The coup de grâce was administered by Trump himself. The president, who four days earlier had pushed hard for the Istanbul meeting on his social media — “Have the meeting, now!” — seemed to lose interest altogether. “Look, nothing is going to happen until Putin and I get together,” he told reporters on Air Force One, suggesting that this had been his real position all along. Putin would certainly agree, but what about Ukraine, Europe and the nasty assurances and details that need to be worked out?
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, left in the unenviable position of being in Turkey amid a process his boss had written off, bravely assured NATO foreign ministers gathered for a meeting in Antalya that Trump was “open to virtually any mechanism that gets us to a just, enduring and lasting peace and that’s what he wants to see.”
Opinion Writer
During oral arguments at the Supreme Court on Thursday morning over President Trump’s order to eliminate birthright citizenship, Solicitor General D. John Sauer barely talked about eliminating birthright citizenship. The government’s goal was supposedly more limited: to persuade the court to prevent federal district judges from issuing nationwide injunctions striking down the things Trump wants to do. But the diversionary tactic didn’t work. There was simply no way to ignore the brazen unconstitutionality of Trump’s order, which came up repeatedly all morning.
In part, that was because the three liberal justices kept bringing it up. Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted that Trump’s order — which would deprive citizenship to babies born in the United States to undocumented parents, or even temporary residents — violated at least four Supreme Court precedents that enforced the clear wording of the 14th Amendment. So what happens, asked Justice Elena Kagan, when a president issues a plainly illegal order and someone goes to court to have it overturned? If the judge finds that it is unconstitutional, is it only unconstitutional to apply the executive order to the party who brings the lawsuit, or to everyone?
“Does every single person affected by the E.O. bring their own suit?” she asked. That seemed to be the implication of the government’s argument. Even if the Trump administration eventually loses the big question of whether the order is constitutional, it can in the meantime deprive citizenship from babies born in the states that didn’t sue, a chaotic state which would add to the deterrent effect on immigration that the administration longs for.
That, said Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, “turns our justice system into a catch-me-if-you-can kind of regime.” The government could continue to act illegally, she said, until everyone potentially harmed by the action figures out how to hire a lawyer and bring a lawsuit. And many people would be harmed by a system where citizenship can be switched off and on depending on what state you’re in. Government benefits that apply only to citizens would be offered in some states but not others, creating a confusing patchwork and a magnet system that would draw immigrants away from the states where Trump’s order still applies.
Even some of the conservative justices who form the swing bloc of the court seemed to have qualms about the limits on district judges that the administration desires, as if they knew Trump’s order cannot stand. (There was very little questioning from them about the fundamental principle of birthright citizenship.) Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that if only the named plaintiffs get relief from an order that is overturned, the courts would immediately be flooded with other lawsuits from states and other groups that want the same result. Justice Neil Gorsuch seemed to echo Kagan’s point by suggesting it would be better for the Supreme Court to get to the merits of the executive order quickly. And Justice Amy Coney Barrett seemed annoyed that Sauer was ducking Kagan’s sharp questions.
It’s always dicey to try to predict an outcome from oral arguments, but it wouldn’t be surprising if the court finds a way to allow some national injunctions against sweeping presidential orders, and eventually rejects Trump’s. Among other reasons, the conservatives want to preserve the ability to overrule Democratic presidents.
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Those annoying federal judges are really getting to Stephen Miller. You could see it in his face on Friday outside the White House and hear the frustration and outright indignation in his words. Miller, the deputy chief of staff and principal architect of President Trump’s immigration policy, has had no luck convincing the courts that the government can deport immigrants at will without hearings, and so he threatened to take a further step if what he called “radical rogue judges” don’t start falling in line.
“That’s an option we’re actively looking at,” he said, when asked whether Trump would suspend the privilege of habeas corpus — the fundamental right of a person to challenge his or her detention in court, which is explicitly granted in the Constitution — for undocumented immigrants. But “a lot of it,” he said, “depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not.”
The right thing, to Miller, means finally accepting one of the administration’s contrived legal justifications for depriving immigrants of the right to a deportation hearing. The government has tried to claim that it can detain and deport noncitizens who “may undermine U.S. foreign policy” by criticizing Israel and supporting Palestinians. That didn’t work. On Wednesday a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit said the government could not move a foreign student at Tufts from one detention center to another in a way that deprived her of a lawyer or a hearing — a concept that the judges described as an “extraordinary proposition.” The student, Rumeysa Ozturk, was released on bail on Friday by another federal judge, after six weeks in detention.
The government tried to claim that because the United States is under invasion by Venezuela, it could summarily deport Venezuelans under the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 statute. That didn’t work, either. Several federal judges have rejected that ludicrous notion, including one appointed by Trump during his first term.
Miller has also maintained that only citizens are entitled to due process rights, not “an illegal alien facing deportation.” But even the most conservative justices on the Supreme Court agreed last month that “the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law in the context of removal proceedings.”
So now the White House is threatening the legal system with a full-blown suspension of habeas corpus, which has happened only four times, in cases of actual war or violent insurrection. Do Trump and Miller really think they can persuade the courts that undocumented immigrants pose a similar threat to public safety? Even the rigorously conservative Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in 2004 that the drastic step of suspending habeas corpus is a question for Congress and cannot be decided by a unilateral whim of the executive branch.
Scalia’s acolytes on the court seem likely to agree with this time-honored principle. Miller and Trump may be desperate to deport a million immigrants this year (and they are nowhere near that number), but the federal courts are going to insist they follow the law to do so.
Contributing Opinion Writer
Supreme Court justices are famous but not well known. Their names are familiar but not their faces. For this reason, David Souter and Stephen Breyer were frequently mistaken for each other. Once during his tenure on the court, Souter was driving from Washington to his home in New Hampshire, and he stopped in a little restaurant to get something to eat. A couple came up to him, and the man asked him a question.
“You’re on the Supreme Court, right?” Souter nodded. “You’re Stephen Breyer, right?”
Souter didn’t want to embarrass the fellow in front of his wife, so he said yes, he was Breyer. They chatted for a little while, and the fellow asked, “Justice Breyer, what’s the best thing about being on the Supreme Court?”
After a pause, the justice answered, “I’d have to say it was the privilege of serving with David Souter.”
Souter, who died Friday at 85, was always among the more obscure members of the court, and few knew of his laconic good humor. His biography was often shortened to a handful of facts. New Englander. Bachelor (despite the ardent efforts of Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg to fix him up over the years). Republican appointee but disappointment to conservatives. He hated Washington, D.C., and retired at just 69 years old in 2009, turning his seat over to President Barack Obama, who replaced him with Sonia Sotomayor.
But there was a lot more to Souter than these snippets suggest. At a moment when the Supreme Court, like the country as a whole, is locked into opposing partisan camps, he was an unapologetic learner. In his first term on the court, in 1991, he was a doctrinaire conservative, even voting with the majority to uphold the so-called gag rule, which limited medical workers at federally funded facilities from discussing abortion with patients.
But in the summer after that first term, he told his colleague Harry Blackmun in a letter that he needed to return to New Hampshire to be alone. “I have wanted as much as possible to be alone to come to terms in my own heart with what has been happening to me,” he wrote.
What happened is that Souter turned into a humane and distinguished justice, who had a greater scope of vision than his background suggested. He was proudly old-fashioned. He was given a television but never plugged it in. He wrote with a fountain pen. He didn’t like electric light. (He moved his office chair around his chambers to catch the sunlight through the windows.)
Yet it was Souter, of all people, who wrote the court’s widely heralded opinion defending the right of the rap group 2 Live Crew to engage in parody and sampling of original music without violating the Copyright Act. He had the breadth of vision to see what was at stake, and that applied to much more than music. Along with O’Connor and Anthony Kennedy, Souter engineered the compromise that preserved the right to abortion in the Casey decision of 1992. He dissented in Bush v. Gore. He voted to guarantee the right to due process of the prisoners in Guantánamo.
There was a time when moderate or even liberal Republicans like Souter held great sway on the court. There was John Marshall Harlan II in the 1950s, Potter Stewart in the ’60s and, in later years, Lewis Powell and John Paul Stevens, along with Blackmun, O’Connor and Kennedy, as well as Souter. That kind of moderate is gone now — gone from the Supreme Court and, it appears, the surface of the earth. Sadly, Souter’s wise jurisprudence disappeared long before the man himself left us.
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Opinion Senior Staff Editor
If there was ever going to be an American pope, Cardinal Robert Prevost — now Leo XIV — was probably going to be it.
Still, as someone who covered the previous two conclaves and the latter years of the papacy of John Paul II, I’m pretty stunned by Prevost’s election. Common wisdom long held that the European-dominated College of Cardinals would never elect an American. The United States was considered too powerful in the world to also put a man on the throne of St. Peter. At the conclaves that elected Benedict XVI and Francis and at this one, handicappers dutifully put a few Americans on the list of papabili, or possible popes, but usually with the caveat that they were long shots.
Prevost, 69, defied the odds. A number of factors point to why.
He was born in Chicago but spent much of his life outside the United States. He lived for two decades in Peru, serving as a missionary, seminary teacher, parish priest and eventually bishop (becoming a naturalized Peruvian citizen). He was also president of a pontifical commission for Latin America, which is home to some 40 percent of the world’s Catholics. So for many of the 133 voting cardinals, he might have been seen more as an international clergyman than a Yank.
In his first speech as pope, from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica, Leo spoke in Italian, as is traditional. He also offered greetings in Spanish — but not English.
His election may have roots in Francis’ papacy. Francis appointed four-fifths of the cardinals who voted in the conclave, many quite recently (including Prevost in 2023) and many from countries far from Europe. A good number of them most likely did not know one another well or had not yet had a chance to gain an understanding of who would be of papal caliber.
But if anyone was on their radar, it was very likely to be Prevost. Francis appointed him to head the Vatican department in charge of bishops, where he helped the pope in appointments and managing the bishops. Many bishops would have met the future Leo when their national or regional episcopal groups made regular trips to Rome.
Let’s not forget the bloc of 10 American cardinal electors.
It is, of course, difficult to know what went through the cardinals’ minds at the secretive conclave in choosing an American. But it’s also easy to imagine they are quite cognizant of the United States’ role in the world — and how that role is shrinking under the Trump administration, whether in the spurning of allies, building of trade walls, withdrawing from diplomacy or retreating from humanitarian aid.
Maybe a time of waning American presence in the world opened the door to an American pope.
Opinion Staff Editor
In April, India suffered one of its worst terrorist attacks in recent history, when gunmen began firing on a group of tourists in the picturesque mountains of Indian-administered Kashmir. More than two dozen civilians were killed by a group of militants, which the Indian government accuses Pakistan of backing, sending the country’s already simmering anti-Muslim and anti-Pakistan sentiments dangerously high.
Now the Indian military has struck at least six sites across Pakistan, including one in Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, with reports of civilian casualties emerging as the smoke clears. This is the first Indian strike in Punjab in more than half a century.
Longtime watchers of this contentious region of the world often call these incidents skirmishes. Rarely do they escalate into all-out war; rather they end after some militaristic back-and-forth and threats lobbed by politicians in media statements and shows of force geared toward releasing the nationalistic blood lust that often comes in the wake of a deadly terrorist attack.
The last serious skirmish, in 2019, ended after India dropped bombs in the wooded hills near a madrasa that it claimed was harboring terrorists and Pakistan dropped some munitions on the Indian side soon after. Things remained touchy for a time — the news media cycle in both countries was sent into jingoistic overdrive — before returning to the uneasy middle ground India and Pakistan often find themselves in.
I was based in Pakistan during that skirmish as a foreign correspondent. As with all modern conflicts, we consumed news of it through cable TV, on social media and through memes, even as fighter jets were flying directly above us. When an Indian fighter pilot crash-landed on the Pakistan side of the border after a dogfight, Pakistani officials soon posted a video of him enjoying tea they had served him, as proof that he was being held in good conditions. The image naturally spread widely online. His return to India was broadcast live from the Wagah border crossing, the site of daily militaristic peacocking by Indian and Pakistani troops — displays so intended for public consumption that there are stands around it for onlookers. Much of the conflict is made for the people watching on both sides rather than for strategic aims.
The spectacle of the Indian pilot’s return gave the conflict between India and Pakistan the sheen of reality television. The fact that the inciting incident — a deadly suicide attack in Pulwama, a town in Indian-controlled Kashmir — resulted in 40 dead members of Indian paramilitary forces seemed to slip away from the public consciousness. Instead, the nationalistic chest puffing of two nations that have been in conflict for almost as long as they have existed became a news event. And in that way, the strange ceremony served as an off-ramp for the heightened emotions of Indians and Pakistanis at a moment that easily could have led to an all-out war.
I had hoped for the same outcome for the two nations in this latest iteration of this long conflict. India and Pakistan share so much with one another: a rich culture and history and millions in each country who originally called the other side home. But the attacks early Wednesday were very different: The Indian military did not drop bombs in the middle of the woods this time. The strikes hit near major population hubs, and Pakistani military officials said that more than 20 people, including a child, have died. It’s hard to imagine this skirmish will end in a TV spectacle and memes.
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Deputy Opinion Editor
If you’re lucky, you have something in your life that gives you purpose, and you have people in your life to talk to about it. Purpose gives me focus; it helps me not get distracted by the hour-to-hour tumult and chaos of the world, and it gives me gratitude for what I’m doing and what I have in my life. When I feel that gratitude slipping from me — when I feel restless, irritable or frustrated — it’s usually because my sense of purpose is slipping for some reason, too.
I’ve been thinking about this because, after Times Opinion’s coverage last week of President Trump’s first 100 days in office, I heard from readers and podcast listeners grappling with this moment and ways to live through it and remain intact. And I thought about the inspiration I drew this year from a favorite source of mine: plays and musicals on Broadway that dealt with purpose in different ways.
These shows delve into dismay and disappointment in the world and their characters’ determination to make things better or happier. They are misfits and outsiders trying to break free of their private frustrations: the high school student Shelby in the play “John Proctor Is the Villain,” who wants to transcend men who have used or abused her; the helper robot Oliver in “Maybe Happy Ending,” who wants to reconnect with his old owner; the school board member Suzanne in “Eureka Day,” who wants the community to flourish as long her values dominate; and Mary Todd Lincoln in “Oh, Mary!,” who just wants a moment back in the spotlight. These characters stayed with me because they were driven by clear intention and a hunger for life and vitality; their performers — Sadie Sink, Darren Criss, Jessica Hecht and Cole Escola — were knockouts in my book because they understood and ultimately delivered on that sense of purpose. All four, along with their shows, were nominated for Tony Awards on Thursday.
But my favorite Broadway show of the season, just narrowly ahead of “John Proctor,” was the aptly named “Purpose,” by the great playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. At the risk of being too on the nose, if you want to think about purpose, see “Purpose,” which won the Pulitzer Prize for drama on Monday. In the tradition of the plays “August: Osage County,” “The Piano Lesson” and “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” the play concerns a few days in the life of a sprawling American family that’s awash in a reckoning over betrayal, mendacity, inheritance (literal and figurative) and what people are called to do. There is a lovely scene toward the end of “Purpose” — no real spoilers — where the patriarch of the family, a character who calls to mind Jesse Jackson, talks about tending to the civil rights movement long ago and tending to bees now, late in his life.
“Honey never, ever spoils — did you know that?” Solomon Jasper says to his younger son, Naz. “And bees just … make that. And to think that I could, in some small way, participate in the miracle of honey, a sweetness everlasting. It gave me … purpose. Yes. A small sense of purpose. Which was always something I needed. Because without it, there is just despair. There is just emptiness. You’ve heard me say it a thousand times, but the movement was … there was such an extraordinary sense of God’s presence then — everywhere you looked. Purpose. And we felt as organized as a hive. Everybody knew their role, knew their potential, that common goal and how to achieve it — and we were all walking through the world just glowing with God. And when that world began to change … there was nothing like it, no feeling like it. The vision of the better place we all carried with us — it was coming true.”
More than anything, “Purpose” challenges you to think about the life course that we find ourselves on, or that we chose, and whether it’s right for us and whether it’s enough. What happens when we lose our sense of purpose so much that we are no longer intact — as humans, as a family, as America? It’s a play that meets our national moment.
Editorial Writer
Many Americans were probably surprised to learn from President Trump in March that Venezuela has invaded the United States and is conducting warfare here through its agents, who are members of a criminal gang.
On Thursday morning a federal judge in Texas forcefully dismantled this claim of invasion as found in one of Trump’s most extreme executive proclamations. Not only did the judge’s ruling effectively ridicule the idea, but he issued a permanent injunction in his Texas district prohibiting the government from using the pretense of an invasion to justify deporting or detaining immigrants.
And Trump will have a hard time denigrating the judge — Fernando Rodriguez Jr. of the Southern District of Texas — as a far-left radical lunatic, because he appointed the judge to the bench himself in 2017. Rodriguez was Trump’s first Latino judicial nominee, and he won praise from pillars of the right, including the Heritage Foundation and Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.
On the basis of this ruling, at least, it’s clear that Trump’s appointee cares a great deal more about history and finding the truth than the White House does. Rodriguez spends several pages going through the details of the Alien Enemies Act passed in 1798, when the country was preparing for a possible war with France, which was resurrected by the deputy White House chief of staff, Stephen Miller, as a legal weapon to swiftly deport immigrants without hearings, according to reporting in The Times. Just by claiming that there’s an invasion on, the thinking went, you can deport Venezuelans to a prison in El Salvador without even having to prove that they were really members of a gang.
But looking back at the original debate over the enemies law, Rodriguez said it was clear the authors were referring to a military invasion or an organized armed force intending to conquer territory, which does not apply to a group of immigrants, even if they have criminal backgrounds.
Trump’s proclamation “makes no reference to and in no manner suggests that a threat exists of an organized, armed group of individuals entering the United States at the direction of Venezuela to conquer the country or assume control over a portion of the nation,” the judge wrote. “Thus, the proclamation’s language cannot be read as describing conduct that falls within the meaning of ‘invasion’ for purposes of the A.E.A.”
Miller has gone on TV repeatedly to insist that federal judges have no business deciding whether invasions or wars exist, which he said is the prerogative of only the president. But Rodriguez dug through multiple legal precedents that show that while the executive branch has broad powers, the judicial branch absolutely has the role of determining whether an official has exceeded his authority. The president, he wrote, cannot simply declare that an invasion has occurred without presenting any proof to a court. “The law does not support such a position,” he wrote.
As The Times recently reported, Miller’s philosophy is to be bold and not worry about potential litigation that may result from the reckless immigration moves of the White House. One by one, members of the judicial branch are now making it clear what they think of that attitude.
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The first reaction to the results of the Canadian elections around the world, including in Canada itself, was that the Canadians had defeated Donald Trump. It was hard to see it otherwise; even President Trump acknowledged that his tariff threats, insults and talk of annexing Canada had upended a race that only weeks earlier looked to oust the Liberals from power over dissatisfaction with the economy.
“You know, until I came along, remember that the Conservative was leading by 25 points,” Trump told The Atlantic in an interview conducted last Thursday and published Monday, seemingly more proud about than disturbed by what he had wrought. “Then I was disliked by enough of the Canadians that I’ve thrown the election into a close call, right?”
Right. Prime Minister Mark Carney, a respected economist thrust into the political forefront by fury at Trump, declared victory early Tuesday, though his Liberal Party looked to end up short of a majority in Parliament. As in any elections, there were many nuances to be sorted out: The Conservative leader, Pierre Poilievre, lost his seat; the left-wing New Democratic Party and the Quebec nationalist Bloc Québécois took drubbings; Carney faced a host of tough choices, including how to deal with Trump. But these were largely drowned out in the moment by the Trump factor.
The Canadian elections are likely to soon fade from American headlines, given the relentless shock and awe generated by the Trump administration. The impact north of the border, however, may be indelible.
Anyone following the N.H.L. playoff series between the Montreal Canadiens and Washington Capitals surely noted the announcement before the last two games in Montreal: “Despite recent events, we ask that in the spirit of this great game which unites everyone that you kindly respect the U.S. and Canadian national anthems.” “Recent events,” of course, means Trump, and the appeal recalled the booing and fighting at the U.S.-Canadian hockey tournament two months ago.
The anger is evident in many other ways, including the “Not for sale” and “Never 51” T-shirts. Canadians have always felt close to but distinct from Americans. Most of them live within 100 miles of the U.S.-Canada border, yet they take pride in differences like their national health system. But a hostile America was something they never imagined.
Carney’s victory speech reflected the anger. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal,” he said, using a word now often heard. “We have to look out for ourselves. And above all, we have to take care of each other.”
These sentiments may be incomprehensible to Trump. In a muddled post on his Truth Social platform on Monday, while Canadians were voting, he again gushed about how “beautiful this land mass would be” if Canada became “the cherished 51st” state and urged Canadians to “elect the man” who would bring this about. That every man running for prime minister totally rejected the offer seemed not to matter. “IT WAS MEANT TO BE!” Trump insisted.
Opinion Writer
Liberals spent much of 2024 coming to grips with the possibility not just that Donald Trump would return to the presidency but also that his victory might mark a generational turn.
Somewhere between the vibe shift and the Pennsylvania shooting, between surveys showing young men lurching rightward globally and those showing that Black and Hispanic voters in America were too, between intraleft debates about whether Kamala Harris should go on the Joe Rogan podcast or whether liberals could jury-rig their own version, a kind of fatalistic demographic despair set in on certain corners of the left: that a long period of liberal cultural dominance had come to an end and what lay on the other side was something like a MAGA future. In this view, a Trump victory wasn’t just a devastating defeat for the left. It also marked a tectonic shift.
A hundred days in, the story looks different, with poll after poll showing whiplash reversals in support for Trump among those groups that seemed, six months ago, to define that generational realignment. It’s not just that Trump is losing support and growing unpopular, though he is, and at a remarkably rapid clip. It’s that the very groups that seemed to define his new coalition are abandoning him so quickly.
According to the former Democratic pollster Adam Carlson, who aggregates political polling, Trump’s approval rating among Americans ages 18 to 29 has fallen by nearly 30 points since his first month in office. In the latest Times/Siena College poll, 69 percent of those ages 18 to 29 either strongly or somewhat disapproved of the job the president was doing. And although there are signs of an enduring gender gap, you can see some pretty strong disapproval just among young men: By the end of March, according to the Harvard Youth Poll, 56 percent of men 18 to 29 were somewhat or very unfavorable toward the president.
If many of these respondents are disaffected voters, alienated from politics to begin with, the most straightforward explanation is that the backlash is simply a kind of mean reversion of political despair. It’s also possible that not much has even changed, given that some analyses of the election suggest that Trump won young men, others that Harris did and the gold-standard data isn’t yet available. The lessons for the midterms or future presidential elections are therefore unclear, even if you’ve been heartened by signs that the president’s actions are negatively polarizing the public on issue after issue. (So far, he seems to be making Americans more positive about free trade, for instance, more supportive of international cooperation and more open to immigration.)
For his entire first term, after all, Trump was a historically unpopular president whose extreme positions mobilized many millions of Americans in opposition — and then he waged a surprisingly competitive re-election campaign in 2020 and stormed back into the White House four years after that. Which is all to say: None of this is written in stone. But probably that should also go for narratives of the unstoppable rise of the new youth right.
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