One year of Trump: unpopular, but efficient

Prefers golfing

That unprecedented productivity is striking. “Trump is the laziest president ever. He regularly falls asleep, often gives the impression that he doesn’t know what’s going on. From his first term we know that he barely involved himself in policymaking and preferred to go golfing.” The great decisiveness in, for example, withdrawing from international treaties or imposing trade tariffs is therefore mainly thanks to the people behind the president. “He has managed to gather a group of capable, decisive people around him. Although he himself seems to do very little, he is one of the most efficient American presidents.”

Efficient, yes. Popular? Increasingly less so. “In presidential popularity polls, Trump is at the bottom, although he himself claims to be more popular than George Washington which is remarkable, given that such polls didn’t exist around 1800. You can see his popularity eroding, even within the Republican Party.”

Van der Heiden finds the large percentage of Independents particularly telling: eligible American voters who identify with neither the Democrats nor the Republicans. “About forty years ago, some 30 percent of Americans considered themselves Independents. Today that figure is around 45 percent, and it continues to grow, because more and more Americans are completely fed up with the polarization between Republicans and Democrats.”

Time for a third party?

For these dissatisfied Americans, a third party could offer a solution, but according to Van der Heiden the possibility of a new party is largely theoretical. “The last time a new party truly gained a foothold in America was in 1860: the Republican Party.” Since then, there have been several attempts, such as Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party in 1912, which later merged back into the Republican Party, or the conservative American Independent Party, founded in 1967, which has so far been unable to gain political influence. Still, given the widespread dissatisfaction with the two current parties, the idea is not far-fetched. Van der Heiden says: “I recently spoke to two Americans who voted for Trump in the last election. When I asked why, their answer was telling: ‘We’re stuck between a rock and a hard place.’”

If Trump’s first year has taught us anything, it’s that making predictions about the rest of his term is largely pointless. But that people both inside and outside the United States are worried seems justified to Van der Heiden. “Another three years of smoldering ruins is certainly within the realm of expectation and one can only hope we don’t have to take that too literally, as was the case when he bombed Iran.” Will he complete his term? “Unless Trump’s health deteriorates so rapidly that he can no longer govern, he would have to go very far to be removed from office. For now, we’re not rid of Trump yet.”