The momentum has shifted. President Donald Trump’s shock-and-awe approach to MAGA governance is generating shock and disgust among Americans.
Massive protest rallies brought millions of people into the streets of big cities and small towns in every state on April 5. People showed up for more reasons than could fit on any one of the many brilliant homemade signs.
People were protesting the Trump administration’s lawlessness. Its abuse of power. Its kidnapping and deporting students for disagreeing with the president. Its terrifying practice of abducting people and shipping them off to be tortured in foreign prisons with no chance to prove their innocence.
Many of us were also resisting the senseless sacrifice of decades of common-good investments in everything from medical research to national parks. We were there to protest the brazenly dictatorial demands that Trump has made for ideological censorship of history, art, education and science.
The president’s stubborn recklessness has hit home for millions of Americans in deeply damaging and personal ways. People living financially fragile lives in retirement or still saving for those years have seen a huge portion of their savings wiped out by a pointless and self-destructive trade war.
It has been a lot.
There’s no doubt that the Project 2025 presidency threw the country off-balance with the viciousness of its anti-American blitzkrieg in its first two months.
I’ve heard over and over again from despairing Americans desperate about what to do. I’ve heard from angry people who were anguished that their elected representatives were not using their platforms and power to slow the assault.
People gathered on the National Mall on April 5 were angry and anguished. But they were also energized. They were joyful to be surrounded by so many others who were motivated to turn the tide.
At some point in the afternoon, there was a shift in the wind, and it felt like rain was about to fall. I felt it physically, but also metaphorically and spiritually.
That shift didn’t start on April 5. For weeks, Tesla Takedown protests against billionaire Elon Musk’s gleeful cruelty and destruction spread across the country and world.
Brave and brilliant lawyers who saw what was coming are challenging the Trump team’s illegal and unconstitutional actions.
And just a few days before the April 5 rallies, Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) denounced the hardship being caused by Trump’s recklessness in a 25-hour speech, an inspirational display of defiance and determination.
Booker noted that “more and more voices” are speaking up to say, “This is not right. This is un-American. This is not who we are. This is not America.” Citing his mentor, the late civil rights leader Rep. John Lewis, Booker urged Americans, “Let’s get in good trouble.”
Still, the supremely arrogant Trump pushes ahead the way he does, bullying, intimidating and demanding submission. He dares his fellow Republicans to invite his wrath by crossing him in the smallest of ways. And congressional Republicans, almost without exception, have fallen in line, offering praise or nonsensical justifications for Trump’s destructive policies.
But I think they are feeling the wind shift, too. That’s why so many House Republicans, even in the deepest red districts, are refusing to meet with their constituents. They don’t want to try to defend massive cuts in care for Veterans or the Social Security Administration.
Trump won’t admit it, but he’s also feeling the shift. Why else would he abandon his plans to make Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) his ambassador to the United Nations? Her district would normally be as safe as a Republican seat could get. But Trump couldn’t count on a Republican replacement winning a special election there.
Trump’s instrument of destruction, Elon “Chainsaw” Musk, has become so politically toxic that Wisconsin voters defied his millions of dollars — even his million-dollar bribes — and rejected his state Supreme Court pick by a margin that no one imagined.
Trump is overplaying his hand. Americans are finding their voice and their courage.
Republican officials like House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) remind me of kids who are so eager to keep playing a baseball game that they pretend not to see the storm clouds and lightning on the horizon, who ignore the rain even as it soaks their uniforms and makes the grass slippery and unsafe. Johnson can see the storm brewing, but he’s turning away from the threat.
There’s been a huge shift in Trump’s favorability since the start of his second term, especially among the younger voters Republicans have been so excited about. A new poll from The Economist/YouGov found that Trump’s net favorability among voters under 30 plunged from +5 at the start of his term to -24 in early April.
It seems that Americans watching the reality of the Project 2025 presidency are coming to the same insight about MAGA-supporting Republicans that the legendary James Baldwin had about an earlier generation: “I can’t believe what you say … because I see what you do.”
Congressional Republicans still have time to do the right thing and stand up to Trump. If they’re not moved to do it for their legacy in history, they should be motivated by their next elections.
Svante Myrick is the president of People For the American Way.
