Donald Trump is incredibly unpopular. His approval rating across multiple polls is well below 40 percent. Fifty percent of respondents say his actions in office have been worse than expected, while only 27 percent support “all or most” of his policies, according to a January Pew Research Center poll. A sampling of polls from February and March found that on average, 58 percent of respondents disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy. In a separate poll, 59 percent said the economy is getting worse.

Even his standout issues are looking lackluster. Traditionally he has polled better on immigration than on other issues, but following the various “surges” of immigration enforcement that acted as de facto paramilitary occupations of cities like Minneapolis and Chicago, 49 percent of poll respondents say they “strongly disapprove” of Trump’s handling of immigration. Half of respondents, including a majority of self-described independents, now support abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) entirely.

Presidents typically enjoy broad support for military actions. An embarrassingly high number of Americans — 40 percent, per CBS — support the US war on Iran, but this figure is still significantly lower than support for past major military conflicts. Just 7 percent of adults support sending ground troops into Iran, a prospect that seems increasingly likely. (A majority of Republican poll respondents support sending “special forces” troops but not a general invasion.) In contrast, CBS found that 92 percent of Americans say the top priority should be ending the conflict as quickly as possible, and 68 percent say Trump has not clearly explained the United States’ goals in attacking Iran.

Trump’s war of choice on Iran has already sent gas prices soaring 32 percent higher than before the attack, with no end in sight for rises in the price of oil. As the conflict drags on, the cost of oil will have an exponential effect on the prices of other goods as well. Perhaps most immediately, the war has delayed the delivery and dramatically increased the price of fertilizer in the United States and Asia. This will almost certainly have a major impact on farmers’ bottom lines as well as costs at the grocery store, which the US Department of Agriculture was already predicting would rise faster this year than in 2024 or 2025 before Trump attacked Iran.

While it is still early in the election cycle, prospects for Democrats regaining control of the House of Representatives currently look fairly strong. It is difficult to imagine that any of the policies Trump is pursuing will make Republicans more popular before November. Winning a majority in the House would not allow Democrats to pass much of their own agenda, but it would give them greater leverage in budget negotiations and greater power to subpoena members of Trump’s government, allow them to release more of the Jeffrey Epstein files, and raise the prospect once again of filing articles of impeachment — even though the Senate is extremely unlikely to come to a guilty verdict.

Trump, obviously, does not want any of these things to happen. Two critical questions for the next seven months are how far Trump and Republicans are willing to go to ensure the GOP remains in full control of Congress, and whether there is anyone in a position to stop them. On both counts, there is cause for concern.

Popularity Only Matters in a Democracy

For years, Trump has insisted that he lost the 2020 election only due to voter fraud. The fact that every investigation has found these claims unsubstantiated has not deterred him from nursing this grievance. Neither has the fact that he won the 2024 election. If there was indeed a great conspiracy to keep him out of office that was successful in 2020, it’s unclear why it would have failed in 2024. But far be it from Trump to hold his grandiose persecution fantasies to a standard of logical coherence.

In response, Trump and congressional Republicans have continued the Right’s decades-long project of making it more difficult to vote. This year, they have been pushing hard to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act into law. If passed, the act would impose extreme new identification requirements both to register to vote and to actually cast a ballot. The bill is currently under filibuster in the Senate and so the exact requirements are not set, but if it became law, the act would require some combination of a passport, an official birth certificate, and additional identification both to register and each time a person voted. It would also increase the frequency with which states are required to purge their voter rolls. And just this week, oral arguments at the Supreme Court suggest that justices in the conservative court majority were open to significantly restricting mail-in voting.

The Trump administration is portraying the SAVE Act as an election integrity measure, but make no mistake: its purpose is to suppress the vote among legitimate eligible voters. The SAVE Act is an extreme version of the Right’s decades-old playbook, one that goes back, at a minimum, to the 2000 presidential election: make it ever more difficult for your opponents’ supporters to vote. If they persist in voting anyway, do your best to avoid counting their votes. If that fails, exploit a politicized judiciary and arcane constitutional processes to take power, as George W. Bush did successfully in 2000 and Donald Trump did unsuccessfully in 2021.

But the party, led by Trump, has also evolved. Republicans are now clearly establishing the tools, rhetorical and practical, to allow law enforcement to insert itself into elections in a manner without recent precedent and guaranteed to favor their party.

Since 2020, a private investigator named Heather Honey has made a name for herself in certain corners of MAGA world, spreading false conspiracy theories about election fraud and helping to orchestrate spurious investigations in Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia. Honey now works as the deputy assistant secretary for election integrity at the Department of Homeland Security, a post that did not exist before Trump’s second term. In March 2025, Honey told right-wing activists that the Trump administration was considering declaring a “national emergency” before the 2026 election and taking direct control of elections away from state and local authorities.

The details of this plan have not yet been reported publicly, but it comes as the federal government is suing more than a dozen states in an attempt to force them to hand over voter files. Before mass protests forced ICE and the Border Patrol to scale down operations in Minneapolis, US Attorney General Pam Bondi attempted to strong-arm such a list from the Minnesota government, demanding it as a precondition for stopping the occupation of the city.

The feds went for an apparent practice run this January, when the FBI (accompanied, inexplicably, by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard) seized 2020 ballots in Georgia with little explanation. The ballots in question, from Atlanta’s Fulton County, have already been reexamined at least three times since the election in the course of various legal proceedings. And in a sign that this tactic may be expanding beyond elections that directly involve Trump, a Republican sheriff in California, who is also running for governor, recently seized 650,000 ballots from 2025, supposedly to investigate fraud in an election where the margin of victory was several million votes.

Making long-term predictions about Trump’s intentions has always been a mug’s game, so let’s conclude with a set of facts. Support for Trump and the Republicans is falling. Trump has a yearslong fixation on the idea that he can only lose an election through voter fraud, often blaming supposed undocumented voters specifically. He is seeking to put the management of elections directly under his control. He and his supporters are finding new ways to insert the police into elections. ICE, whose budget is now larger than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined, has a history of occupying cities perceived as unfriendly to the president and committing shootings, mass violations of civil rights, and murder.

Very likely, any “national voting emergency” will come with far greater speed, resources, and violence than any opposition will be able to muster. Maybe Trump doesn’t need to be popular as long as he can push through the “correct” results on Election Day.