Republicans Will Have to Step Up to Save Trump from Himself

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, March 12, 2025

 

In many respects, Donald Trump deserved the public’s warm retrospective on his first term. That gauzy hindsight contributed to his restoration to power and a honeymoon quite unlike anything he experienced in 2017, but voters’ faith in Trump wasn’t irrational. The president — or the conventional conservative Republicans who staffed his administration and controlled the 115th Congress — was committed to fixing Barack Obama’s many mistakes. This time, however, the president is doing the opposite. He’s doubling down on his predecessor’s impractical and ideological mismanagement of America’s foreign and domestic concerns. Understandably enough, the trust voters invested in Trump and the honeymoon that trust produced are evaporating at a rapid clip.

 

In 2017, Republicans put an end to the “uncertainty” over which Barack Obama and his mercurial regulatory regime presided with tax code reform. Negotiations between Trump and congressional Republicans over the plan that eventually became the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act were not without tension, but Paul Ryan and his conservatives got their way. In addition, Republicans helped steer a revised North American free trade agreement away from Trump’s preference for punitive tariffs on America’s allies. And when Trump attempted to impose tariffs on Mexico in a bank-shot pursuit of unrelated geopolitical objectives, Republicans in Congress rediscovered the authority over foreign trade the Constitution vests in the legislature and threatened a humiliating showdown with their party’s president. Trump backed down, much to his own benefit. In the end, he presided over a stable economic environment for which voters longed after the pandemic stole it away.

 

Absent the austere economic advice of the conservatives Trump has either sidelined or cowed in the intervening years, the president has indulged his instincts. As such, instability reigns again, and voters have noticed. A CNN/SSRS poll published Wednesday found that the confidence voters once had in Trump’s ability to manage the economy is gone. Today, 56 percent of respondents disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy with 44 approving — an almost total reversal from late January. Unsurprisingly, given the public’s concern over their individual economic circumstances, Trump’s overall job approval rating mirrors his rating on the economy with 54 percent disapproving of his conduct in office.

 

Trump’s management of America’s foreign affairs in his first term was similarly focused on repairing the damage Obama and his allies had done amid their mind-boggling commitment to treating America’s allies like enemies and its enemies like allies. The Obamans were pathologically hostile to America’s democratic friends, like Great Britain, and its partners of strategic necessity alike — states like Israel and Saudi Arabia. Obama tried to usher both Iran and Russia in from the geopolitical cold, and he was rewarded for his efforts with chaos.

 

Trump 1.0 put an end to all that. It armed Ukraine — something the Obamans balked at. It embraced Israel and stopped voting with America’s adversaries against Jerusalem in the United Nations. It put renewed pressure on rogue states (Trump’s dalliance with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un notwithstanding) like Venezuela and Cuba based on the predicate that those nations are governed by illegitimate, abusive, and — most importantly — anti-democratic juntas.

 

This was not a MAGA project. It was a conservative Republican project largely conceived of and executed by conservative Republicans. Today, Trump has unveiled contempt for the architects of those policies, and the feeling is quite mutual. Untamed by the GOP, Trump has set himself to pursuing an Obama-style foreign policy. His administration is once again voting with our enemies in the United Nations. He is muscling and taunting our allies in ways that contrast unfavorably with the (at best) passive aggression he reserves for America’s opponents abroad. Commensurately, the public’s impression of Trump’s foreign policy competence has collapsed. That CNN poll found Trump’s disapproval rating on foreign affairs rising to 58 percent of respondents — his worst performance on any of the issues that survey tested save “tariffs.”

 

And contrary to the GOP’s messaging during the 2024 campaign, the Trump team has not cleared the air of the corruption that helped suffocate Biden’s presidency. The president displays contempt for the appearance of propriety. He maintains his personal stake in his proprietary social-media venue, pitches the public on investments in cryptocurrency “meme coins” featuring himself, seeks to use tax dollars to prop up the value of financial products favored by his children, and appears to be selling direct access to himself to the tune of $5 million per audience. Republicans can turn a blind eye to all this only so long as voters agree to do the same. But the public’s ambivalence won’t last forever — certainly not if voters fail to see a return on their investment in a second Trump presidency.

 

Amid all these ominous portents, the GOP would be better served by abandoning their submissive posture. The guardrails Republicans placed around Trump in his first term made him a better president. Indeed, what voters liked about the first Trump term is that, in policy if not rhetoric, it was a triumph of generic Republicanism. This time around, the GOP has decided to give Trump all the rope he wants, and he seems to be fashioning enough nooses for everyone with it.

 

Second terms are often messy affairs, but the wheels are coming off this one far too early. The sooner the GOP stops withholding its better judgment in deference to the loudest of the Bristol Electors on social media, the better the party and the country will be for it.