Read this and then just think about how they tortured Hillary Clinton for alleged corruption because her husband ran an international charity:
President Trump has pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the convicted founder of the crypto exchange Binance, according to people familiar with the matter, following months of efforts by Zhao to boost the Trump family’s own crypto company.
The president signed the pardon on Wednesday, the people said. Trump recently indicated to advisers that he was sympathetic to arguments of political persecution related to Zhao and others, one of the people said.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump had “exercised his constitutional authority by issuing a pardon for Mr. Zhao, who was prosecuted by the Biden Administration in their war on cryptocurrency.” She added: “The Biden Administration’s war on crypto is over.”
Binance didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
A pardon will likely pave the way for Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, to return to the U.S. after the company pleaded guilty in 2023 to violating U.S. anti-money-laundering requirements and was barred from operating in the country.
The company has spent nearly a year pursuing a pardon for Zhao, who left prison in September 2024 after serving a four-month sentence for related charges. Earlier this year, the company hired lobbyist Ches McDowell to help pursue a pardon, the Journal previously reported.
The Justice Department imposed a record $4.3 billion fine and burdensome oversight on Binance, which the department said had become a colossal money-laundering hub through which sanctioned groups and criminal organizations laundered billions of dollars in illicit funds.
The pardon may also prematurely end the Justice Department’s three-year Binance monitorship, set up to ensure the company complies with U.S. financial crime laws. However, it likely won’t end a separate monitorship established by the Treasury Department without the additional approval of Trump or the Treasury secretary.
[…]
Binance first reached out to allies of Trump last year, offering to strike a business deal with the family as part of a plan to return the company to the U.S., the Journal reported earlier this year. Representatives of the Trump family have held talks to take a financial stake in the U.S. arm of Binance.
Binance has been one of the main drivers of the growth of World Liberty’s dollar-pegged cryptocurrency, called USD1. It delivered World Liberty’s first big break this spring when it accepted a $2 billion investment from an outside investor paid in USD1. Binance has also incentivized trading in USD1 across platforms it controls.
It was just an outright bribe. A massive one. And it’s just a-ok.
I dream of the day when the crypto market implodes and all these assholes get their due. Of course they’re working hard to make it too big to fail so we the taxpayers will have to bail them out. Uday and Qusay will probably end up winners in the end anyway.
I guess the scale of Trump’s corruption in this term is just so overwhelming that we aren’t even gong to talk much about it. Nobody knows what to do since there’s no oversight anywhere and certainly no law enforcement capability in the federal government to hold him accountable.
I don’t know if we even have the tools to set this right. But if we are able to remove these people from power massive reform is going to be required. I wish I was more confident that it will happen. But, first things first. Putting an end to this misbegotten reign is job one.
Most of America first took notice of Marco Rubio when he gave one of the most-cringe prime-time performances of all time, the official Republican rebuttal to Barack Obama’s 2013 State of the Union address. No one who watched is likely to forget Rubio’s awkward stare as he furtively reached for a water bottle, cementing his reputation as the thirstiest man in the U.S. Senate. It’s a testament to his limitless ambition that he came back from that and is now one of the most powerful people in the world.
Rubio rode into national politics on the Tea Party wave in 2010, after having served for a decade in Florida state politics, rising to become majority leader and ultimately speaker of the state’s House of Representatives. Although he was a staunch conservative from the beginning, Rubio showed early on an aptitude for sensing which way the wind was blowing. Over the years he held both moderate and conservative positions on most issues. For instance, at first he rejected the scientific consensus on climate change and then, a few years later, decided it was true. He was once one of the Republican Party’s most vocial advocates for comprehensive immigration reform and even sponsored the DREAM Act. Now he energetically supports Donald Trump on the most draconian deportation program in American history. He broke with the GOP on more than one occasion when it came to budget battles, at times striking a pose as populist defender of the little guy, but overall he was a standard-issue right-wing conservative on taxes and spending.
With the exception of the ill-fated “Gang of Eight” attempt to overhaul immigration policy, Rubio has never been much associated with domestic politics. His focus has always been on national security and foreign policy. He was an unreconstructed hawk in the Senate, supporting the war in Iraq and taking a hard line on Iran. But he’s often used the language of human rights in condemning China, Turkey and Venezuela for crimes against minority populations or suppression of dissent.
And in what looks in retrospect like one of Rubio’s most independent moves, as co-chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence with Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., he led a three-year investigation that found clear evidence of Russian interference on Trump’s behalf in the 2016 election, exactly as Robert Mueller’s investigation had established. Trump and other Republican officials are still spreading the claim that the investigation was a hoax, despite the fact that the current secretary of state personally validated its findings. (You have to wonder if anyone has ever explained that to Trump; logically, it should have been a deal breaker.)
Trump and other Republican officials are still spreading the claim that the Mueller investigation was a hoax, despite the fact that Marco Rubio, Trump’s current secretary of state, personally validated its findings.
Then again, Trump also overlooked the fact that as an opposing GOP presidential candidate in 2016, Rubio once said, “He’s like 6’2”, which is why I don’t understand why his hands are the size of someone who is 5’2″… You know what they say about men with small hands.” That line got back to Trump, creating an infamous primary debate moment when Trump insisted on national TV, “I guarantee you there’s no problem.” For a man who carries around grudges like precious offspring, it’s odd that Trump has apparently decided to overlook all that, but Rubio worked hard to abase himself and get into the inner circle.
The political establishment, including many Democrats, were relieved when Rubio was chosen for the State Department job, reassured that a supposedly serious fellow with Senate credentials would keep Trump foreign policy from going off the rails. The hope was that Rubio might stop the president from doing something silly, like bailing out of NATO or invading Greenland. Little did they know that Rubio had happily made a deal with the devil and now seems to relish the idea of ripping up the world order in Trump’s image.
They certainly couldn’t have anticipated how eagerly Rubio would join in the deportation crusade by targeting foreign students for visa violations, as well as for unauthorized opinions about Israel and Charlie Kirk. Considering his years of support for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), it came a something of a shock when Rubio cavalierly endorsed the administration’s shutdown of vital medical and food programs, which is likely to mean sickness and death for millions. He even agreed to betray informants under U.S. protection to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in exchange for an agreement to lock up purported Venezuelan gang members in El Salvador’s gruesome gulag.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, Rubio was one of the first to condemn President Vladimir Putin’s aggression, calling him a killer and suggesting that he was suffering from some kind of mental decline. But it didn’t take long for Rubio to change his tune, voting against military aid early on and adopting the Trump line that a negotiated settlement was the only way out. In the Senate, Rubio backed Israel’s brutal assault on Palestinian civilians, although at one point he voted against more military aid, saying the U.S. needed more money for border enforcement. As secretary of state, Rubio has mostly taken a back seat on those big issues to Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and, more recently, to freelance adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner. But that has just given him time to pursue his own special interests.
When Trump tapped Rubio as acting national security adviser after a clash with the more establishment oriented Mike Waltz — since banished to Siberia, aka the United Nations — Rubio got some runway to move on his own priorities in Latin America. Coming as he does from the anti-Castro Cuban-American community of South Florida, Rubio has a strong strain of anti-left ideology which has made him especially obsessed with Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s socialist authoritarian president.
According to recent reports in the Wall Street Journal, the extrajudicial killings, CIA covert actions and pending war plans against Venezuela are all being driven by Rubio. After some back-and-forth between him and special envoy Richard Grenell, along with oil companies who’d welcome a deal to exploit Venezuela’s enormous reserves, Rubio and deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller have carried the day with a full-fledged plan to pressure and perhaps depose the Venezuelan leader. Other countries in the region are expected to take notice.
As a former White House official told The New Yorker, “If you’re Panama, you think this is about you. If you’re Colombia, you think it’s about you… if you think it’s a signal, it is a signal.” And that signal isn’t just directed at other countries. The same official pointed out that this has a domestic dimension as well, by reinforcing the idea that Latino gang members and drug cartels, are enemies of America. “This is happening while you have the deployment of National Guardsmen to cities,” the official said. “You’re getting people used to these kinds of actions. This is expanding the definition of the use of force.”
Marco Rubio almost certainly intends to run for president in 2028 and sees his service in that cause as the best way to fulfill his own agenda and expand both his power and his political profile. He’s certainly not the only person in the Trump administration with that idea, but he stands out in that many observers still view him as an “adult in the room” with establishment credibility. That’s entirely wrong. He’s a fully paid-up MAGA fanatic now, and no one should think otherwise.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has placed new recruits into its training program before they have completed the agency’s vetting process, an unusual sequence of events as the agency rushes to hire federal immigration officers to carry out President Donald Trump’s mass deportation policy, one current and two former Homeland Security Department officials told NBC News.
ICE officials only later discovered that some of these recruits failed drug testing, have disqualifying criminal backgrounds or don’t meet the physical or academic requirements to serve, the sources said.
Staff at ICE’s training academy in Brunswick, Georgia, recently discovered one recruit had previously been charged with strong arm robbery and battery stemming from a domestic violence incident, the current DHS official said. They’ve also found as recently as this month that some recruits going through the six-week training course had not submitted fingerprints for background checks, as ICE’s hiring process requires, the current and former DHS officials said
In whose mind are the behaviors we’ve seen representative of professional policing? How many serious law enforcement professionals would welcome these physically, temperamentally, and criminally unfit people on their teams?
I can’t help but wonder how many of these men are pardoned January 6 convicts, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, Patriot Front, etc. How convenient that masks make it difficult to identify them by facial recognition.
The White House belongs to the people of the United States and is administered as a national treasure. Donald Trump treats it like just another of his shitty golf resorts. His demolition of the East Wing is hitting nerves even among Americans numbed by years of Trumpism.
Some Americans are expressing shock and outrage as President Donald Trump demolishes the entire East Wing of the White House to make room for a lavish ballroom. The administration has bypassed concerns raised by preservationists and so far stopped short of seeking approval from the commission overseeing construction on federal buildings. Trump on Wednesday said the ballroom is expected to cost $300 million — up from a previously estimated $200 million — suggesting it could be a larger structure than initially planned. The White House on Wednesday released a list of donors for the project, which Trump has repeatedly said is privately funded. For decades, the East Wing has housed offices for the first lady, and its foyer has been the main point of entry for visitors attending social events and tours.
Do not let MAGA get away with repeating excuses for this Trumpish “monument to bribery.” “Privately funded” is beside the point, even if true. The White House is not Trump’s to do with as he pleases. He is a temporary resident (fingers crossed). Obama did some White House renovations too? Also beside the point. Obama went through a review and approval process, but those are Executive Branch functions in this case, and he controls the Executive Branch. The White House is not Trump’s to do with as he pleases. But who is going to tell him?
Obama went through the National Capital Planning Commission as the law requires. Plans were submitted, reviewed, revised. Open bids were made/considered. If you can’t see the difference between that and what Trump is doing, you are beyond help. https://t.co/GZUahS6M3W
“Our hands are tied,” Rebecca Miller, executive director of the D.C. Preservation League, told the Washington Post. Normally such projects first get input from preservationists. “It’s very frustrating that there’s nothing that the organization can do from a legal or advocacy perspective.”
The Post adds, “The next stage of the project is also likely to proceed with few restraints: The key panel slated to review the president’s construction plans is now stocked with Trump allies ready to approve them.”
The project has left historians and architects deeply alarmed. The National Trust for Historic Preservation on Wednesday urged officials to pause until it could go through the “legally required public review process.” Last week, Trump seemed to suggest to donors that “no approvals” were required for the project.
The emperor may have no clothes but he has a backhoe. He’s thumbing his nose at the nation. At you.
FWIW, here’s what I’ve gleaned from anecdotal experience. I was out at rush hour on Wednesday with the sign above. There were the usual horn toots, waves, and thumbs-up I’ve come to expect from doing this now for months (and now five days a week at different major intersections). Yesterday was different. I heard more shouts of “Fuck Trump” than ever before from passing cars, and they were angrier. People may not have noticed how Trump is steadily demolishing the U.S. Constitution and their Bill of Rights protections. But this demolition is visual. It registers. People feel it. It’s an open cut over Trump’s other eye.
Your job now is to make sure everyone you know and every online place you visit sees it. Work. The. Other. Eye.
John Ganz is one of the best essayists around and I highly recommend his Substack if this is the sort of thing that gives you sustenance. It does me and I’m grateful for it. Nearly every time I read his site I come away thinking, “damn, that’s good, I wish I’d thought of it.”
I’m sure by this point we’ve all seen some horrific videos of ICE abductions of migrants. Something looks off about those guys: They don’t look like feds or even cops; they look more like Proud Boys or Jan 6ers. That makes sense, since DHS is using white nationalist propaganda in their hiring drive. Proud Boys in Ohio publicly brag about being “high on the hog” because of the new hiring spree. Many of the videos portray them not just as menacing thugs, but also as incompetents, clearly unprofessional, out of shape, and sometimes unable to make arrests. Commentator Adam Johnson had a sharp tweet about it: “There are many ways of looking at ICE’s recent terror campaign, but probably the most salient is a bunch of people who can’t get real jobs harassing and kidnapping people with real jobs.”
Another way to put this is that ICE is a central part of the Trump regime’s overall organization of the mob. They are drawn from what Marx called the “scum, offal, refuse of all classes,” Engels called “the depraved elements of all classes,” and what Arendt identified as “declassés of all classes.” In fact, a great deal of Trump’s political apparatus is drawn from those ranks. Arendt summed up the lives of mob leaders as characterized by “failure in professional and social life, perversion and disaster in private life.” Semi or even open criminality and the adoption of mob attitudes and behaviors are practically job requirements for service in the administration. Just look at Paul Ingrassia, White House employee and, until some hours ago, Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel, whose leaked texts revealed a “Nazi streak.” He’s represented accused rapist and pimp Andrew Tate and had connections to the antisemitic demagogue Nick Fuentes.
If you needed any additional evidence that MAGA is more of a kleptocratic demimonde or criminal racket than a political movement, look at how Steve Bannon gravitated to Jeffrey Epstein just as the stench of disgrace became unbearable for most others. Or look at Trump’s otherwise inexplicable commutation of the sentence of fraudster George Santos. Marx wrote that the mob was drawn partially from “discharged jailbirds”—in Santos’s case, it’s literally true. The message there is clearly: “Support me, and I’ll take care of you.”
When Trump nominated Paul Ingrassia to the Office of Special Counsel at the DOJ (someone that I’d written about over the last few years) my first words were, “wow, he’s really scraping the bottom of the barrel.” Ingrassia’s a nasty piece of work and the idea that he would even be allowed to set foot in the Department of Justice is an insult to very American.
But loyalist low lives like him are all Trump has left to hire. He can’t get most of the confirmed even by the GOP potted plants in the senate so he’s doubling and tripling up on jobs, such as making reality show star Sean Duffy Transportation Secreta as well as the NASA Director and Marco Rubio as Secretary of State and National Security Adviser. It’s just too hard to vet the dregs of humanity that are still available to staff his administration.
I suspect Trump will take care of Paul Ingrassia. Look for him to land somewhere in the administration where he doesn’t require confirmation.
My decision was a long time coming. Earlier this year, the chief content officer for our parent company, e.Republic, stated in a meeting that we should not run articles that could draw the attention of the Trump White House and have them try to shut us down.
At the time, her position struck me as wrong in a couple of ways. Chiefly, there was the obvious betrayal of journalistic ethics. Secondly, however, Governing is such a small (although I’d like to say prestigious) publication that the idea anyone in the current White House was reading it, let alone preparing to hammer it, struck me as dubious.
Governing was started nearly 40 years ago by editors from Congressional Quarterly who thought state policy should get more news coverage. Even after it was bought in 2009 by e.Republic, Governing remained one of the few outlets to pay continuous attention to governments outside of Washington. It often receives compliments such as being called “the Rolling Stone of state of the state addresses.” It’s a wonky publication, and it’s not huge, but it has a sterling reputation for covering a crucial niche.
[…]
That’s one of the saddest parts of Trump’s anti-media drive. After the government has gone after the big guys — Trump has engaged in court fights this year with CBS, ABC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press, not to mention defunding NPR, my former employer — the little guys too often decide they lack the resources to stand up. Capitulation becomes the easier course.
We’ve seen this happen in other countries. Self-censorship is particularly damaging because it takes place in private; in the absence of photos of reporters walking out of the Pentagon, no one even knows it’s happened. And individuals and institutions do a more thorough job of stifling themselves than governments ever could. Not knowing where the line might be, they grow hyper-cautious and shy away from publishing anything that might cause offense.
In my role as editor of Governing, I received edicts from above throughout this year warning me to stay away from a variety of topics. For example, I was told that an article about attitudes toward vaccines caused “consternation” among the higher ups because that issue has become partisan. I warned my boss that if we weren’t going to reflect reality — if we weren’t going to do journalism — I’d have to quit.
Vaccines are partisan. Jesus H. Christ.
I don’t know how many other publications are doing this but I would expect that even if it isn’t as blatant, it’s happening everywhere. Anyone who is a public critic of Trump and his henchmen at least thinks about it. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t. But if the country is so far gone that we’re all afraid to criticize our leaders, much less the alleged free press, we have much bigger problems.
Trump and the Republicans treat California like garbage. We’re not amused:
It’s a state ballot measure about redistricting, but Proposition 50 has many California voters thinking nationally — and a lot about President Trump.
Those voting for it overwhelmingly say one reason is for them to oppose the Trump administration — which they also feel generally treats California worse than other states — and oppose national Republicans.
Overall, those who see their Prop 50 vote as a national issue are backing it, and that rationale is in turn helping push the “yes” side of the measure into the lead.
By contrast, those who see it more as a state issue are opposed: Those voting “no” are driven by a concern that redistricting would shift power away from the state’s rural areas and toward the cities and cost the state money. But their views are outnumbered at the moment.
Those voting no are Republicans. There is no reason that power would shift toward cities. It’s just that their interests will be represented by Democrats who are, by the way, better on rural issues than Republicans are. They’ll be fine. They just won’t have a racist authoritarian representing them which is obviously very traumatic for many of them. Too bad.
The Trump administration’s plan to overhaul the U.S. refugee resettlement process, including a drastic reduction in overall annual admissions, coincides with a concerted effort to prepare thousands of White South Africans to relocate to the United States through the system, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post and people familiar with the matter.
If the administration succeeds, almost all people admitted to the U.S. as refugees — as many as 7,000 from a maximum potential pool of 7,500 — could be Afrikaners, a group not traditionally eligible for the program but one that President Donald Trump says has been tyrannized by South Africa’s Black majority. The remainder may be chosen because of their ability to speak English or their views on “free speech,” people familiar with the matter said, upending a system that for decades had taken in people fleeing conflict and persecution from all over the world regardless of race or language.
Only white racists need apply for refugee status in the United States. And when you think about it, it makes sense. We are once again, a bold, unapologetic, white supremacist state with no pretensions to pluralism or tolerance and no commitment to strive for any kind of racial progress.
I will not be surprised to see that plaque just quietly disappear from the statue some day soon. It’s very DEI.
President Donald Trump ’s plan to cut record beef prices by importing more meat from Argentina is running into heated opposition from U.S. ranchers who are enjoying some rare profitable years and skepticism from experts who say the president’s move probably wouldn’t lead to cheaper prices at grocery stores.
The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association along with the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund United Stockgrowers of America and other farming groups — who are normally some of the president’s biggest supporters — all criticized Trump’s idea because of what it could do to American ranchers and feedlot operators. And agricultural economists say Argentine beef accounts for such a small slice of beef imports — only about 2% — that even doubling that wouldn’t change prices much.
Trump wants to help his buddy Mileil by lowering tariffs to next to nothing on Argentinian beef. That’s just how it works now. These ranchers need to get with the program.
The economic consequences of allowing Trump and Bessent to dispense American policy based on whims and the needs of their best buds is, as yet, unknown. The markets are in an AI fever dream and so far, American companies and producers have been absorbing the costs of the ridiculous tariffs. Maybe that’s fine and Trump will emerge triumphant as the greatest economic mind since Adam Smith. But the jury is definitely still out.
There are some objective, measurable reasons to say that the US economy, which appears OK by the most commonly used measures, is definitely not OK once you look under the hood. One essential aspect of this weirdness is the economy is strongly bifurcated: AI is booming, but the rest of the economy isn’t. Another aspect is that in many ways the economy feels “frozen”: while there have been no mass layoffs so far, people who have lost their jobs or are just entering the work force are finding it very hard to get new jobs. Third, while the economy is growing thanks to AI spending, it’s a K-shaped expansion: People who were already affluent are becoming more so, but the less well-off are under severe pressure. For example, there are clear signs that middle-to-low income consumers are struggling: car loan and credit card delinquencies are rising, and grocers report that shoppers are buying cheaper varieties of food. At the same time, the affluent are spending freely: the top 10% of the income distribution now accounts for nearly half of all consumer spending.
What’s going on? I would argue that Trump’s wildly erratic policies are creating huge uncertainty which is deterring many companies – essentially those that are not in the AI sector or a sector catering to the affluent – from making investments. And those forgone investments include hiring new workers. The result is that much of the economy is frozen — companies aren’t hiring or investing. This freeze, in turn, explains both worker anxiety and rising inequality. Without the AI boom/bubble spending, we might very well have fallen into a recession, as some economists like Mark Zandi have claimed. And despite the AI boom, times for many workers are tough.
[…]
Overall unemployment hasn’t risen that much, but the number of long-term unemployed — would-be workers who have been jobless for more than 6 months — had soared as of August, and has probably continued to rise since then:
Another important indicator of a troubled labor market is Black unemployment. After all these years, Black workers still tend to be “last hired, first fired.” And while the overall unemployment rate (dashed green line) hasn’t risen much so far, the Black unemployment rate (blue line) has soared, presumably because Black workers are finding it especially hard to find jobs in this frozen economy:
Again, we have yet to see mass layoffs, so most workers still have their jobs. But workers believe, rightly, that if they should happen to lose their current job they will have a hard time finding another. This obviously means that workers have much less bargaining power than they did when the job market was tight. Employers don’t have to give workers big wage increases to hang on to them; they can impose onerous conditions, like ending remote work, without fearing that employees will quit, because they have no place to go.
Historically, strong demand for labor has been especially good for lower-paid workers, while weak demand has hit them hard. The post-Covid expansion, during which labor was scarce, was marked by big gains at the bottom and a surprisingly large fall in wage inequality, what David Autor, Arindrajit Dube and Annie McGrew have called the “unexpected compression.”
Incidentally, all through the Biden-era expansion I kept hearing people say that the economic recovery was only benefiting an affluent minority, that ordinary workers were being left behind. This wasn’t at all true at the time. But it is true now. The Atlanta Fed has a wage tracker that, among other things, estimates the rate of wage growth at different parts of the wage distribution. During the Biden years wage growth for the bottom fourth of the wage distribution (blue line) was consistently higher than wage growth for the top fourth (red line). Now that equalizing process has gone into reverse.
He says that every economist he knows is extremely concerned:
Many economists — actually, all the economists I know — are worried about a potential downturn. The AI boom is troublingly reminiscent of the 90s tech bubble. After the sudden bankruptcies first of a subprime auto lender, then an auto parts supplier built on hidden loans, JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon suggested parallels between bad lending in the private credit market and the bad subprime lending that brought on the 2008 crisis. To quote Dimon: “I probably shouldn’t say this, but when you see one cockroach, there are probably more.”
I hate to be cynical but I am beginning to wonder if Trump is going to be able to keep the balls in the air until he’s on his way out or gone. He may be the luckiest person in the world so it’s entirely possible. On the other hand, this is hitting hard early in his term and people are feeling it even if it isn’t translating into recession yet. The Republicans think they’ll have Morning in America in a couple of years but it is much more likely we’ll be fully falling into the dark ages.
Not that Trump cares because he does what he wants, but the new PRRI survey shows a very unhappy country:
The survey offers a snapshot of the nation’s sour mood just more than a year before the 2026 midterms — and suggests that anger could rewire political alliances and test the durability of Trump’s support.
The 16th annual American Values Survey, by Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), is worth studying because it tracks religion, values and mood, with a vast sample across racial and religious lines. The poll has been a reliable pre-election barometer.
PRRI CEO Melissa Deckman tells Axios that it “looks like political independents are very unhappy with Trump’s actions, [with] … close to two-thirds on many indicators saying the administration has gone too far in its policies,”
If it is true as they say that opinions tend to be solidified a year out, the Republicans are in trouble:
Nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction, fueled by dissatisfaction with President Trump’s impact on the economy, immigration, race relations and the nation’s global standing, according to a new poll with a big, broad sample.
Even among Republicans, a significant share — nearly 30% — gave Trump low marks on the economy and how the government is functioning.
The poll of 5,543 adults (age 18+) was conducted online Aug. 15 to Sept. 8, with a margin of sampling error of ±1.79 percentage points.
The findings are similar to other major polls: An AP-NORC poll out this week found 69% of Americans thought the nation was headed in the wrong direction and 30% in the right direction. A Gallup Poll last month found 67% of Americans are dissatisfied with how things are going in the U.S., and 29% are satisfied.
In the PRRI poll, taken in partnership with the Brookings Institution, 62% say the country is going the wrong direction, led by Democrats (92%) and independents (71%).
24% of Republicans said the nation was heading in the wrong direction, the poll found.
The 68-point gap between Republicans and Democrats on that question is the widest ever recorded in PRRI’s 16 years of surveys on religion and politics.
By contrast, during President Biden’s last year in office, 94% of Republicans, 70% of independents, and 41% of Democrats said the country was moving in the wrong direction.
Six in 10 Americans say the state of race relations in the U.S. has mostly changed for the worse since the beginning of the year.
Six in 10 Americans also say the cuts in federal funding of health care programs such as Medicaid, Medicare and the Affordable Care Act have gone too far.
The same share of respondents said they’re dissatisfied with how the Trump administration deals with other countries.
A majority of those surveyed (54%) say Trump’s tariffs on imported goods have gone too far.
A majority also believes the cuts in federal funding and grants to universities and research institutions have gone overboard (55%).
Most Americans appear to be strongly opposed to the Trump administration’s aggressive moves to remove millions of unauthorized immigrants and those who previously had protective statuses.
Nearly two-thirds oppose arresting and detaining unauthorized immigrants who have resided in the U.S. with no criminal record.
Nearly six in 10 agree that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers “should not be allowed to conceal their identity with masks or use unmarked vehicles when arresting people.”
About two-thirds oppose the U.S. government deporting undocumented immigrants to prisons in El Salvador, Rwanda or Libya without allowing the people to challenge deportations in court.
Oh, and by the way:
A majority of Americans agree “President Trump is a dangerous dictator whose power should be limited before he destroys American democracy” (56%), up from 52% in March 2025, compared with 41% who agree “President Trump is a strong leader who should be given the power he needs to restore America’s greatness.”
Most Democrats (91%) and independents (65%) agree with the first statement, while most Republicans agree with the second statement (82%).
Seven in ten white evangelicals (73%) agree that Trump is a strong leader, as do 54% of white mainline Protestants and 55% of white Catholics. In contrast, majorities of other religious groups view Trump more as a dangerous dictator, including 53% of Hispanic Protestants.
