Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images

Anyone who has paid close attention to Donald Trump’s utterances over the years is acutely aware of his black-and-white perspective on America’s history and its current trajectory. It’s a tale of incredible heroism matched by incredible villainy with Trump representing the summit of national achievement and his opponents and detractors motivated strictly by malice, dishonesty, and even treason. There is no nuance in his publicly expressed worldview, no room for honest disagreement. And up until recently, there has been no doubt that the 47th president believes he is the true champion of the values and interests of the overwhelming majority of the American people, who have (in his estimation) lifted him to supreme power three times now by ever-increasing margins that reached epic, unprecedented levels in 2024.

And that’s why it’s startling to see a new note of anger toward those same American people emanate from his soapbox at Truth Social:

@realDonaldTrump/Truth Social

Assuming Trump believes half of what he says, this aggrieved astonishment makes some sense. Throughout the 2024 campaign, he regularly depicted the Biden administration as utterly depraved and consciously evil — a nation-destroying enterprise with not a bit of redeeming value, having wrecked the living paradise Trump was busily building during his first term. The 47th president fully resumed and even accelerated his American-greatness project in 2025 and is already so satisfied with his success that he is devoting a great deal of time to building monuments to himself and demanding global recognition of all he has done. Yet instead of being able to bask in his accomplishments and glory in his plans, he’s being told by the political experts in his orbit that the people aren’t happy. Indeed, even as he claims that in one year the country has gone from Weimar levels of hyperinflation to a dizzying climb in real wages and living standards, he’s being pushed out on the road to exhibit concerns about affordability, a term he has mocked and repeatedly called a hoax.

It’s not just the White House political staff who are worried. Off-year elections are regularly showing troubling signs for Trump’s party. The lockstep machinery in Congress that gave the president his One Big Beautiful Act is showing some wear and tear. The U.S. Supreme Court majority he helped forge is reportedly poised to deny him the beloved tariff powers that stand at the very center of both his economic policies and his foreign-relations strategy. Worse yet, Trump seems to fear, the people themselves have turned on him. Don’t they get it? Don’t they “understand what is happening”?

The president’s growing dismay over the ingratitude of the American people may help explain his determination to insulate his party from public opinion via an unprecedented wave of pre-midterm gerrymandering of congressional seats. If so, you can imagine the level of fury he must feel toward the Republican members of the Indiana state senate who just thwarted his demands for a new map giving Republicans a monopoly on representation in the U.S. House. He personally met with and spoke to many of these people. He sent J.D. Vance to lobby and threaten them some more. His allies in MAGA-land joined the Hoosier pressure campaign, some of them going over the brink into threats of violence and others treating the gerrymander as a necessary tribute to the late Charlie Kirk. Yet they defied the man who has already restored American greatness, distracting him from his divinely blessed work. How dare they!

Your normal politician experiencing the sort of setbacks Trump has recently encountered would privately complain, maybe cry in a beer or two, and then buckle down to the work of restoring public trust and improving the poll numbers (which Trump regularly denounces as “fake” but seems to follow closely). It’s unclear if he has that in his makeup. A successful presidency is not an aspiration for him; it’s an accomplishment worth celebrating with some extra gilding of the White House and a few more international peace prizes. In reality, every second-term president loses some altitude as lame-duck status sinks in — the wise chief executives give their underlings some slack to distance themselves from the incumbent and prepare the way for a succession. But Trump isn’t just a president; he’s the leader of a movement that has remade American politics and saved a country headed straight to hell. So the MAGA prescription for the GOP in the remaining three years of the Trump presidency is to hew ever more closely to his wishes and stand proudly in his enormous shadow.

If his current grumpiness about public opinion persists or even intensifies, Trump would not be the first leader to be undone by the sense that his country didn’t deserve him. It is, in fact, an occupational hazard for those who view themselves as world-historical figures instead of mere elected officials with limited horizons, operating within constitutional boundaries. Given his famous unmanageability, it may be vain for Trump’s advisers to urge him to admit some shortcomings in his policies and show some empathy for those who believe they are suffering in this greatest of all moments in U.S. history. It’s going to be a long three years if he simply cannot adjust to adverse public opinion and grows contemptuous of the people whose adulation he believes he has earned.

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