LOOKING at approval ratings of US presidents after their first year in office is an interesting exercise. Most presidents in recent years have net negative approval, with more than half of the population disapproving of their work as president. The exception is George W Bush after 9/11, when the US public rallied around the president after the shock of the attack and after his bellicose rhetoric to conduct a War on Terror around the planet. Otherwise, most people seem to feel that their presidents are a disappointment because they sell a bag of tricks with a well-funded campaign and then deliver almost nothing of their promises. Trump’s job approval rating is between 40 and 44 per cent in favour and the rest opposed. But you would not suspect that from watching his performances at press conferences and in meetings. It is the same old Trump, confident and harsh, strongly aware of his political agenda and speaking in the name of the people to justify his actions. Unpopular, yes, but no more unpopular than most presidents. Joe Biden’s popularity after his first year was around 43%, no different than that of Trump. Turnout for the presidential elections has remained relatively steady (60% in 2004 and then 64% in 2024), so there is little evidence of cynicism when it comes to elections itself. People seem to get excited by the prospect of change but then find themselves disappointed rapidly.

But the phenomenon of Trump is closer to that of Obama than it is to any other recent president. From different sides of the US political spectrum, both men (Trump and Obama) nonetheless galvanised large sections of the population to treat them as their ideological messiahs – Obama (Yes We Can) and Trump (Make America Great Again or MAGA) promise not small transformations, but radical change. Neither had been able to fulfil that agenda because the structure of US politics prevents large-scale change to protect the conglomerates and their hold over US institutions. One of Trump’s great allies, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, the spokesperson for MAGA conspiracies and the dyed-in-the-wool Trump supporter, broke with Trump over his foreign wars. Recently, she went on national television to say, ‘This is the same Washington playbook that we are so sick and tired of that doesn’t serve the American people, but actually serves the big corporations, the banks, and the oil executives. Greene believed that Trump would abandon the old pillars of US power and fulfil an agenda for the US citizens who had been left behind by the globalised economy and who seemed to have no future beyond the length of a methamphetamine pipe. Right after his illegal bombing of Venezuela and the kidnapping of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro, Trump met with executives of oil conglomerates to tell them that the country would be open for their spoilage. There would be no benefit to the constituents of MAGA, whose hunting rifles and red caps would not earn them the wages that they feel owed by their US passports.

Trump’s contradictions are those of the far right of the special type, which speaks in the voice of the ‘common people’ but does not have an agenda that would benefit the vast masses. They say ‘people’, but their policies benefit the billionaires and the conglomerates; the people are the voters and the crowds, but not those whose lives would improve in any substantial way by foreign wars or by the harsh round-up of migrants within their own cities. All of this makes for great theatre – Maduro in handcuffs in a New York courtroom or the bounty hunters of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division; but the payback for the precarious will be insignificant. The oil companies will post high profits, and the small businesses will struggle to hire US citizens at the awful wage rates that they offer to undocumented or barely documented migrants within the US.

In three areas of social policy, Trump has shown total disregard for law and for public opinion. These are worth a brief assessment:

1.     Imperialist attacks. In 1973, the US Congress passed the War Powers Act to prevent a US president from unilaterally waging wars against anyone and anywhere. This was in response to President Richard Nixon’s ‘secret’ bombing of Cambodia. Since returning to office in 2025, Trump has authorised the bombing of at least seven countries (Nigeria, Iran, Iraq, Somalia, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen). There has been no meaningful congressional authorisation for these attacks other than rhetorical statements about these wars being part of a counterterrorism or law enforcement action. The US Congress responded with renewed War Powers legislation intended to reassert its authority and require explicit approval for further hostilities, but these efforts have been either ignored or threatened with a presidential veto. This pattern reflects a continuation and expansion of executive war-making conducted almost entirely outside democratic oversight. The attack on Venezuela, which violated the UN Charter and a range of other treaties signed by the US, shows the total disregard by US imperialism of the rules-based system established after World War II.

2.     Chaos in the Streets. Domestically, immigration enforcement has followed a similar pattern of disregard for public accountability and local authority. Large-scale ICE raids have been carried out in cities and workplaces despite objections from mayors, governors, and local law enforcement, often bypassing established coordination protocols. These operations have led to mass detentions, family separations, workplace disruptions, and, in some cases, serious injuries and deaths (including that of Reneé Nicole Good in Minneapolis on 7 January 2026), intensifying community fear. Polling consistently shows limited public support for indiscriminate raids, yet enforcement has expanded through federal task forces and deputisation programmes that override local policies. The result has been heightened tension between federal power and local governance, with civil liberties concerns left largely unaddressed. As Trump and European leaders talk about how protesters are treated in other countries, such as in Iran, they ignore their own treatment of pro-Palestinian protesters (who are against genocide) and of anti-ICE protesters (who are for universal human rights).

3.     Hunger in the Homes. Trump has twice been elected with the promise of MAGA, which many people in the United States interpreted as meaning that their everyday lives would improve. They hoped for less precarious employment and better access to services (whether public or private). But measurable gains for US households remain limited. Real wages for non-supervisory workers have been largely flat after housing and healthcare costs, with rents rising roughly 5% annually in most cities. The main policy output from the Trump administration – extended tax cuts – delivers modest monthly benefits to median earners, while higher-income households capture most of the total value surrendered by the tax authorities. Job growth has continued, but much of it is concentrated in low-wage and insecure employment sectors, such as leisure, hospitality, retail, logistics and health support, alongside rising temporary and multi-job employment. Manufacturing and public employment, which are typically well paid because the unions are in these sectors, have lagged; union density remains near 10%, leaving job quantity up but job security and working conditions largely unchanged. This is not the MAGA that the US public seemed to imagine or at least this is not the MAGA for the working-class: anger in this sector, however, is not going to be easy to discern as there is almost a religious attachment to the phenomenon of Trump.

One of the most important elements of the far right of a special type is the speed with which it conjures up new targets, and when it fails to tackle one, the other is already riling up popular sentiment. Annex Panama. Then annex Greenland. Annex Venezuelan oil. Deport immigrants. Harass the left-wing protesters. Amnesia sets in about the failed promise of the past target as the next target excites possibilities. There is always something to annex and always someone to arrest, the infinitude of opportunities keeps the far right of a special type always relevant and its critics stuck in what appears to be the politics of yesterday. Drawing up a list of failed promises is insufficient. It is rational but not emotional. The politics of the far right of a special type are predominantly fought in the terrain of emotions and not ideas; the politicians of the far right demean ideas as the domain of the left-wing intellectual, while they hold fast to issues of the day, the next annexation, the next arrest, the next act of decisive machismo that denies the past and promises a never achievable future. Trump lives in that contradiction: he dismisses questions about his records, throws his jumbled vocabulary at any criticism, and answers with the matter of the hour, the fierce determination to annex and arrest which excites his base that believes that the pot of gold is at the end of that rainbow, forgetting that there have been so many rainbows before it.