It’s almost like a bizarre political science experiment: Just how many unpopular policies can one president pursue? From starting a war with Iran to threatening Greenland to building a new White House ballroom, President Donald Trump’s unshackled second-term priorities are compounding the mounting electoral risk for his party in November’s midterm elections.

Trump has always inspired strong emotions, pro and con. But in his first term, Trump pursued relatively few specific policies that big majorities of Americans opposed. He probably generated the biggest backlash with his moves to separate immigrant children from their parents at the border (two-thirds opposition) and limit travel from several Muslim-majority nations (about three-fifths opposition).

His other signature policies (the border wall and 2017 tax cut) split the country much more closely between opposition and support. “The things that affected people personally, he had majority support for in the first term, primarily on the economy,” says GOP pollster Whit Ayres.

Trump returned to office last January with greater freedom to maneuver. Amid widespread disappointment with President Joe Biden’s performance, voters in 2024 “were fundamentally in agreement with Trump on a lot of issues,” says Doug Sosnik, the top White House political adviser for Bill Clinton in his 1996 reelection. The Supreme Court’s 2024 decision immunizing presidents from criminal consequences for conduct in office removed a potential limit. And unlike his first term, Trump did not feel compelled to provide top administration jobs to Republicans from other party power centers; indeed, no Republican power centers independent of Trump still exist.

When Trump first arrived in Washington in 2017, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell both kept some distance. Trump also faced pushback from other Republicans, not only in Congress but within his administration, keeping his agenda closer to public opinion — as when opposition from a handful of GOP senators derailed his deeply unpopular 2017 attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act. By contrast, placating Trump is the top priority for the Congress led by House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune.

The collapse of these restraints has encouraged Trump to unleash all the impulses he contained in his first term, from attacking Iran to chiseling his name onto the Kennedy Center.

Some of the second-term initiatives that have sprung from Trump unbound do have majority support. From the outset, most Americans have approved of his moves to control the flow of illegal immigration at the border. Most also approve of the provisions in last year’s summer reconciliation bill reducing taxes on tips and overtime (though in practice those changes are each benefiting fewer than 1-in-10 households.)

But these exceptions are dwarfed by the second-term Trump policies, large and small, that face lopsided public opposition. Preponderant majorities of Americans have said in polls they oppose many of his biggest initiatives, including the war in Iran, his tariffs, his health care cuts, and ICE’s enforcement of immigration laws. Comparable numbers oppose him tearing down the East Wing and renaming the Kennedy Center. A narrower majority rejects his signature One Big Beautiful Bill. The number of Americans in polls who support his desire to acquire Greenland probably isn’t much larger than the population of Greenland itself. Across a wide range of domestic and foreign policies, Sosnik says, many Trump voters now feel they “didn’t get what they were signing up for.”

Meanwhile, the heat shield that protected unpopular policies during Trump’s first term has dissolved: Today far more Americans say his agenda has hurt than helped the economy. “The first time around it was ‘Yeah, I don’t like this guy, but something is going right on the economy,’ and that dynamic is nonexistent today,” says Democratic pollster Nick Gourevitch.

As Ayres notes, Trump has never worried much about voters outside his coalition. But visible cracks are opening in his base: Depending on the survey, around 30% of Republicans oppose the Iran war and his tariffs while about one-fifth say immigration enforcement has gone too far and he’s wrong to tear down the East Wing.

Trump’s determination to advance such a consistently unpopular agenda is toxic for his party. Probably only a small share of the Republicans expressing dissatisfaction with him will cross over to vote for Democrats in November’s midterm elections. But many of them might not vote at all, even as the intense backlash to Trump’s actions captured in these polls is mobilizing Democratic-leaning voters in huge numbers — a dynamic evident in the party’s succession of off-year electoral victories since his return.

Congressional Republicans, fearful of Trump’s social media thunderbolts, have resolutely ignored the mounting evidence of public dissatisfaction and made no effort to curb his excesses. In that they are behaving much as the Republicans who controlled the House and Senate did when the situation in Iraq deteriorated under President George W. Bush before the 2006 election.

Republicans then thought they were protecting Bush — and each other — by declining to pressure him to change course. But what they considered loyalty, voters viewed as arrogance in refusing to reassess policies that had lost the country’s confidence. Republicans lost control of both congressional chambers that fall and the presidency two years later. That precedent looks more relevant the longer Trump persists in choices, at home and abroad, that most Americans reject.

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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Ronald Brownstein is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering politics and policy. He is a CNN analyst and the author or editor of seven books.

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