Nate Cohn
speaker
982 appearances
7 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 16 Sep
Nate Cohn’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
I think it does matter. And I think that although the president may not care about the result of a poll, and I actually think he kind of does care about the results of polls personally, Michael, it's just my interpretation. I think that it does affect things he does care about. All right. Well, let's discuss that when we come back.
So I think that before I offer the reasons why I think this does matter and in particular could matter more later, I think it is worth acknowledging that the president to this point is probably pretty insulated from these results. A 42 percent approval rating isn't great, but it's not a political catastrophe. His base is still mostly on his side.
As you alluded to, congressional Republicans aren't going to break away from him based simply on the result of this poll. But I think that the biggest reason why this number would be concerning to the White House is because this isn't necessarily the end of his fall.
There's a lot of reason to think that the president's approval ratings have been in sort of steady decline over the last month or two. None of the factors that are driving down the president's approval rating are in the rearview mirror yet. They're still happening. They're still potentially exerting. a downward pull on his numbers.
And the president also can continue to take additional measures that could continue to drag his approval ratings down further.
We haven't yet had a full-on confrontation with the judiciary, even though one may be brewing. The president has talked about deporting citizens to El Salvador. I'm not saying he's going to do that, but if he does, then he's at risk of losing even more support. The point is, is that the actions that the president has taken at this point have already done discernible political damage.
And if he continues with this pattern of conduct, he risks additional damage. And it's worth noting that we're talking about Trump's core strengths here, the economy and immigration. So he's risking the foundation of his appeal for large segments of the electorate.
And although it's true that today the president isn't at much risk to lose support from Republicans or something, I think it's worth noting just how quickly he could get into trouble, because the majority that the Republicans have in Congress is so thin, because he depends so much on maintaining an aura of dominance, and because...
Large elements of our society at this point have stayed on the sideline. They haven't really forcefully spoken out against the president. And as it becomes clear that a large share of the public disapproves of the president, people feel more emboldened to come out against him.
Yeah, I mean, we live in a democracy that values public opinion in some deep way. No one likes polling, but everyone really cares about whether a majority of the country is on your side. And there is a moral weight to having a majority of the country on your side. There was moral weight to Trump winning the popular vote, for instance, that he didn't possess in 2016.
And that gets taken away from him here. And I think that there will be practical consequence to that, especially given the breadth of his ambitions.
Yeah, and as I alluded to, the Republicans have a very narrow majority in the House, and that creates two major risks to them. One is that they could lose control of the chamber in an election. The poll, by the way, found Democrats with a lead on what we call the generic ballot, which is the question asking whether you want Democrats or Republicans to control Congress.
And they want Democrats to control Congress. So that's one risk. The second risk is that even if the Republicans have controlled Congress until November 2028, He may not have a governing majority in the House if he can't keep nearly every member of the chamber in line.
And as the president's approval rating sinks, there are greater incentives for moderate Republicans from districts that voted for Kamala Harris or only but narrowly voted for Donald Trump to defy the president in their pursuit of reelection.
And there may just be genuinely skeptical members of Congress who feel emboldened to oppose his agenda on the merits because they know that the president is weak. That would threaten his ability to extend his tax cuts, to slash entitlement programs, or anything else he may want from the Congress.
And then the president could find himself almost as like a lame duck sooner than later if the trends in the poll were to continue.
Exactly. And there are other organizations and people and institutions who might be likelier to resist President Trump than they would if he had a 55 percent approval rating, a law firm under attack, a university. The judiciary, all of these groups are ever so subtly affected by whether they feel like they have the wind of public opinion at their back.
And as the president's ratings sink, I think they become likelier, maybe even only slightly likelier, but likelier nonetheless. to oppose the president.
I thought that both in generalities and in specifics, the poll provided a lot of evidence that there was very little public support for Trump to claim an even more assertive and powerful version of the presidency than he already has.
Some of this is already beginning to hurt him politically, as we talked about in the context of the Garcia case, and as we talked about with this whole idea that the president is going too far. I mean, almost every excess we're talking about are cases where the president is stretching his authority too beyond what we would have agreed in the past the president could undertake on his own.
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