Republicans weighing down President Donald Trump’s sliding job approval ratings often insist that his agenda contains many popular policies. Those arguments do not understand what makes political leadership successful.
While some White House policies are popular, policy is one leg of the three-legged stool of political leadership. Rhetoric is also important. So, too, does implementation, especially at the top level. Without its perfect joints, this three-legged stool is prone to tipping over and crashing.
“Public policy communication is as important as public policy itself,” said Jeffrey Brauer, a political scientist at Keystone College, near Scranton, Pennsylvania. “This is something that many political leaders in the US on both sides of the aisle tend to forget or tend not to see in the first place.” How policy is made, Brauer added, affects “voters’ perception of policy success.”
“This explains the wide gap between initial, broad support for the administration’s immigration policy and the sharp decline in turnout,” he said. “The majority of Americans do not agree with the use, especially with the techniques used.”
About that.
Trump’s strongest political asset has probably been immigration. During the 2016 campaign, the president vowed to secure the Mexican border. He released. After illegal immigration under President Joe Biden, voters turned to Trump (again) to fix the problem. Despite their frustration over inflation, voters chose the 45th president over Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, the incumbent vice president, and made him the 47th president, because they saw border security as a major concern and trusted him to curb illegal immigration and deport foreign criminals.
Rhetoric and tactics
In the year since Trump returned to the White House, his administration has seen a dramatic drop in illegal border crossings from Mexico and launched a massive deportation program to bring back criminals. But as of this week, Trump’s job approval rating for immigrants is 8 percentage points below the surface of the latest RealClearPolitics poll (44.4% positive, 52.4% negative). What’s going on? Rhetoric and tactics; that’s what happened. That’s what happens.
Polls show that voters are unhappy with Trump’s immigration policy, in particular, because of the brutal tactics used by the Department of Homeland Security. One example: Spanish American citizens (and who have not committed any crime, not that it should matter) have been forced to “show their papers” – in other words: produce proof of citizenship or arrest and detention by government authorities. Another example: The constitutionally questionable and violent behavior of Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Minneapolis, to say nothing of the shootings of Twin Cities protesters Renee Good and Alex Pretti.
Then there is the third leg of the stool: rhetoric.
Although the president has long called the killings of Good and Pretti tragic and has now said so more than once, he continues to tread on that message by denigrating these dead Americans and subtly suggesting that the shooting, while unfortunate, was understandable, if not justified. “He was no angel, and he was no angel,” Trump told NBC News in an interview. It is this attitude that now has voters who support the president’s immigration enforcement agenda reevaluating.
And to be clear: When Trump’s job approval ratings on immigration turn upside down within a year, from plus-8 points in January of 2025 to negative-8 points today, that’s evidence of voters doing a major reassessment.
That’s why it doesn’t really matter that, as Republicans say, most voters “prefer Trump’s immigration policies over Biden’s.” Voters don’t compare Trump to Biden. The 2024 election is long overdue. They judge the current president on his policy, his spending and his rhetoric – and they find him lacking two out of three.
“The majority of Americans want to deport undocumented criminals, and they want to deport the undocumented people who came here in the Biden years. But not if that means killing American citizens; scenes that look like kidnappings, stories about children being ripped off by their parents; cars left running on the road as people are kidnapped,” said Brian Rosenwald, Ethics Administration expert at Ethics Leadership at Ethic University. of Pennsylvania. “The cost is very high and it is changing public opinion on this issue.”
Three-legged stools
Trump and the Republicans were not alone in failing to understand the importance of the three-legged leadership chair. Remember President Barack Obama saying all the right things after Russia’s annexation of Crimea amounted to the first phase of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, yet he refused to give Kyiv weapons and ammunition to fend off further violence from Moscow. It’s an interesting story of a politician getting the right to speak but making policy. (Guess who made the US weapons that light up Ukraine. Trump, during his first presidency.)
Republicans can console themselves all they want with polls showing that voters would choose Trump over Biden (and Harris) on a given policy, be it immigration, the economy or anything else. There is unlikely to be a single issue unless they get Trump and his lieutenants in the administration to make the necessary changes in tactics and rhetoric.
But Democrats beware, especially those eyeing a 2028 White House bid: Gaining the right to speak will not sway voters to support a candidate for policies they find unacceptable or inadequate. Oh, and there’s no such thing as tactical adjustment when the policy is wrong.
David M. Drucker is a political and policy columnist. ©2026 Bloomberg. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency.
