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'The American People Do Not Want Oligarchy': Poll Shows Trump's Approval at Historic Low at 100-Day Mark
A whopping 72% of respondents said that they believe it is "likely" that Trump's policies will cause an economic recession in the short term.
Apr 28, 2025
As U.S. President Donald Trump nears the 100-day mark of his second term, a recent ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll shows that his approval rating now sits at a historic low of 39%, a nadir that prompted one prominent progressive to remark that the negative public sentiment comes as "the resistance is just beginning."
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who has mounted a highly successful "Fighting Oligarchy" tour across America in recent months, highlighted the findings of the poll on Sunday and wrote: "The American people do not want oligarchy, authoritarianism, or attacks on Social Security, Medicaid, or the VA," speaking of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
The poll, which conducted a random national sample of 2,464 adults in English and Spanish between April 18-22, found discontent among voters when it comes to Trump's handling of multiple policies issues, particularly on the economy.
A whopping 72% of respondents said that they believe it is "likely" that Trump's policies—such as sweeping tariffs—will cause an economic recession in the short term.
What's more, 53% say the economy is worse since Trump took office and 62% said that the prices for things they rely on have gone up.
Trump's overall approval on immigration policy, one of his core campaign issues, is also less than 50%. When it comes to his handling of immigration—an area where Trump has moved to roll back birthright citizenship, deported U.S. citizens, and invoked a rarely used wartime authority to deport Venezuelan nationals to a megaprison in El Salvador, among other measures—his approval rating sits at 46%, according to the ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll.
Additionally, over 55% of Americans say Trump is "going too far" when it comes to seeking to expand the power of the presidency, closing federal agencies, laying off federal employees to reduce the size of government, and taking measures agains this political foes.
Overall, his approval among Americans has dipped from 45% positive in February to 39% positive on the eve of the 100-day mark, which is on Tuesday.
According to The Washington Post's analysis of the poll results, Trump's approval at 100 days in both of his terms is lower than any other president's at or near the 100-day mark "since polls began." Polling data on this question stretches back to former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's (FDR) third term, per the Post, when his approval rating was at 68% at the 100-day point. ABC News' write up of the poll results says that "Trump has the lowest 100-day job approval rating of any president in the past 80 years."
Some have drawn parallels between Trump and FDR, whose first 15 weeks in office in 1933 were dominated by a push to work with Congress on economic recovery and relief for working people, the first phase of what's known as the "New Deal." However, historians have noted that in substance the two could not be more different.
In reporting piece published Monday, the Post noted that Roosevelt's push in the first 100 days led to major new laws, while Trump largely relies on executive order.
"Roosevelt spent an awful lot of time trying to craft constitutional justifications in legislation, and draft it in such a way that the courts might accept it," Anthony Badger, a historian and author of FDR: The First Hundred Days, told the Post. "He wasn't trying to do it by executive order."
The historian and author Eric Rauchway toldCNN recently that substantively Trump's policies are the "opposite of the New Deal."
Trump "seems to be taking apart regulatory mechanisms. He seems to be drawing down public investment in a variety of areas, including the arts and so forth. He seems to be, as far as I can tell, diminishing resources sent to the Social Security Administration, which of course is the central piece of the New Deal’s proto-welfare state," Racuhway told the outlet.
In a similar vein to Sanders, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich wrote Monday that Trump's actions in his first 100 days serves as a call to mobilization and to "loudly and boldly sound the alarm."
"The U.S. Constitution is in peril. Civil and human rights are being trampled upon. The economy is in disarray," wrote Reich. "At this rate, we won't make it through the second hundred days."
Reich suggested that that answer is for Americans to speak out and urge lawmakers in Congress, both chambers of which are currently GOP-controlled, to launch impeachment proceedings against Trump.
"Americans must be mobilized into such a huge wave of anger and disgust that members of the House are compelled to impeach Trump (for the third time) and enough senators are moved to finally convict him," he concluded.
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Why Is It Happening Here? And Why Now?
In the early 1970s the corporate elite, conservatives, and neoliberals launched what became a 50-year-long class war from above against the hard-won rights of working people in all their American diversity.
Apr 18, 2025
In early April, historian Harvey J. Kaye made these remarks at a conference in Barcelona, Spain. Common Dreamshas published the transcript with his permission.
In the aftermath of the 2016 U.S. elections, I wrote an article titled “Who Says it Can’t Happen Here?” I opened with these words:
Donald Trump’s candidacy and now, presidency, have resurrected a public discourse not heard in this country since the Great Depression—an anxious discourse about the possible triumph in America of a fascistic authoritarian regime over liberal democracy. It’s a fear that the popular writer Sinclair Lewis turned into a 1935 bestselling novel titled It Can’t Happen Here—although, as Lewis actually told it, it sure as hell could happen here in the United States.
However, it did not happen. At least, it did not happen then. Nor did it happen in 2017. But it is happening now.
Why? Arguments vary. Journalists, editorial writers, and all too many academics—so many of whom are actually liberal and progressive Democrats—say it was due to either the Democratic Party’s failure to effectively communicate the truth about the economy or working-class racism, sexism, and generally low cultural standards. What they ignore is that the making of the “crisis of democracy” began five decades ago in the 1970s.
What Americans never heard in the mainstream media was any reference to the 50-year-long class war and culture war campaigns waged by the corporate elite, conservatives, and neoliberals against the democratic achievements of what we might call the Long Age of Roosevelt from the 1930s through the 1960s. They never heard talk of how those forces subordinated the public good to private greed; laid siege to the hard-won rights of workers, women, and people of color; enriched the rich at the expense of everyone else; hollowed out the nation’s industries and infrastructures; produced a devastating recession and lethargic recovery; and pushed the environment to the brink.
So, I offer two questions. Why did it not happen in the 1930s? And why is it happening now in 2025? The short answers are:
First: It did not happen in the 1930s because in 1932 American voters elected the Democrat, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to the presidency and effectively launched the most progressive decades in American history. Call it the Long Age of Roosevelt—an age that extended from the 1930s through the 1960s.
Second: It is happening now because in the early 1970s the corporate elite, conservatives, and neoliberals launched what became a 50-year-long class war from above against the democratic achievements of that Long Age—that is, a class war versus the hard-won rights of working people in all their American diversity.
All of which poses a critical third question. What should the answer to the first question teach Democrats and other anti-fascist Americans about responding to the answer to the second question?
The only way to confront a mortal national crisis and save American democratic life is to do what Americans, with all of their faults and failings, did in the 1770s, 1860s, and 1930s and 60s.
Popularly known as “FDR,” Roosevelt was essentially an American aristocrat—but despite that, he rejected the “Gilded Age” order with its ever-intensifying concentration of wealth and power and its widening extremes of rich and poor. He did so because that order was denying the nation’s revolutionary promise of “a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” and a democratic government of “We the People” to the vast majority of Americans.
He had entered politics in 1910 as a progressive reformer. And yet, during the next 20 years, he became not just a liberal in the American sense, but actually a social-democrat and even something of a radical. (Though he never used either word to describe himself.)
He had long worried about what conservative political rule might do to America. And in the shadow of the worst economic and social catastrophe in the nation’s history, he truly feared it would lead to some kind of authoritarianism.
However, he knew U.S. history and he recognized how earlier generations had confronted and prevailed over mortal national crises in the American Revolution of the 1770s and the Civil War of the 1860s, that is, by radically transforming the country. Knowing that, he wrote in 1930, “There is no question in my mind that it is time for the country to become fairly radical for at least one generation.”
In his 1932 campaign against the incumbent president, conservative Republican Herbert Hoover, he projected a “New Deal” involving an impressive array of policies and initiatives to not only combat the depression, but also empower working people with economic security and freedom. As Roosevelt would say, “Needy men are not free men.” In fact, he audaciously suggested an Economic Declaration of Rights to redeem and renew the promise of the Declaration of Independence.
As FDR saw it, the only way to truly secure and sustain American democratic life was to progressively enhance it.
Which is exactly what he and a generation of Americans would do. They didn’t simply reject authoritarianism. They phenomenally improved the economic and physical state of the nation and—at the very same time—radically enhanced American freedom, equality, and democracy.
Moreover, encouraged by FDR himself, working people did more than take up the labors of the New Deal. They actually pushed him to go even further than he may ever have planned to go—and together they initiated revolutionary changes in American government and public life.
Consider this. They subjected capital to public regulation and raised the taxes of the rich. They legislatively empowered government to address the needs of working people and the poor (which included advancing industrial democracy). They organized and, in their millions, joined labor unions, consumer campaigns, and civil rights organizations to both fight for their rights and advance the “We” in “We the People.” They established the Social Security system. They built schools, libraries, post offices, parks, and playgrounds all over the country. They vastly expanded the nation’s public infrastructure with new roads, bridges, tunnels, and dams (and provided electric power to almost a million farms.) They repaired and improved the national landscape and environment. And they energetically cultivated the arts and refashioned popular culture.
All of which seriously antagonized capitalists, and led the richest men in America to organize the Liberty League and spend great sums of money trying to portray FDR as a communist and thereby prevent his reelection in 1936. But they utterly failed to secure popular support.
Roosevelt did not ignore their efforts. He famously said, “I welcome their hatred.” Indeed, when accepting his party’s nomination for a second term, he delivered the most radical speech in American presidential history. Speaking to a stadium crowd of 100,000 and millions more national radio, he said:
These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power.
I absolutely love that speech, and American working people loved FDR. One Southern textile worker spoke for the majority of his class when he wrote to Roosevelt, saying, “[You are] the first man in the White House to understand that my boss is a son of a bitch.”
Still, for all of the humor, FDR took the anti-democratic threat seriously. In 1938—just before the midterm congressional elections— he went on radio and warned:
As of today, fascism and communism—and old-line Tory Republicanism—are not threats to the continuation of our form of government. But I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, then fascism and communism, aided, unconsciously perhaps, by old-line Tory Republicanism, will grow in strength in our land.
Yes, FDR and those whom Americans would come to call the “Greatest Generation” left much to be done—especially regarding race and gender. But they had equipped themselves to defeat fascism overseas in the 1940s and learned how to democratically rebuild the nation.
Furthermore, the democratic upsurge of the 1930s did not cease during the war years. Americans continued to organize and enlist in labor unions, consumer campaigns, and civil rights organizations.
Encouraged by all that they had accomplished, Roosevelt called on Americans to envision an America and a world characterized by four fundamental freedoms, the Four Freedoms: Freedom of Speech and Worship and Freedom from Want and Fear—which became a theme of the war effort.
And in his 1944 State of the Union Address, he articulated his fellow citizens’ postwar aspirations by proposing an Economic Bill of Rights to include a right to a job at a living wage; a comfortable home; medical care; a good education; recreation; and economic protection during sickness, old age, and unemployment. A proposal that was enthusiastically embraced by the American Federation of Labor, the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the National Farmers Union, and all the leading civil rights groups.
But Roosevelt did not assume they could easily secure it. Thinking of the corporate bosses, he predicted the likelihood of fierce “right-wing reaction.” But he also warned—in words that should speak loudly to Americans today—“If such reaction should develop—if history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called ‘normalcy’ of the 1920’s—then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of fascism here at home.”
FDR won a fourth presidential term in 1944, but passed away in April 1945. Still, the Age of Roosevelt did not come to end. As much as capitalists, Republicans, and Southern Democrats made the most of the Cold War to obstruct the further advance of democracy and social democracy, a generation of Americans, and their children, would not forget what they had accomplished. And in the 1960s, Americans witnessed a new democratic upsurge challenging every aspect of national life.
Pushed by the resurgent activism, and inspired by FDR’s New Deal and vision of the Four Freedoms and Economic Bill of Rights, President Lyndon Johnson called for the making of a Great Society and a War on Poverty. A liberal Congress led by Greatest Generation veterans moved to enhance American democratic life.
Congress passed historic civil rights, voting rights, and fair housing acts, and a major reform of the nation’s immigration law. It also made healthcare a right for the elderly and the poor, significantly expanded educational opportunities for children and young people, and enacted laws and created agencies to clean up and make the environment, marketplace, and workplace safer (EPA, OSHA, CPSC). At the same time, the Supreme Court guaranteed and strengthened the constitutional separation of church and state and moved to liberate women to control their own bodies. Plus, many state governments built new schools and universities and, in the Northern and Western states, expanded industrial democracy by granting collective bargaining rights to public workers.
That’s why it didn’t happen. Now to why it’s happening now.
All of this terrified Southern white supremacists, political and religious conservatives, and corporate bosses—and in the early 1970s they were mobilizing to not just counter the democratic surge but also reverse the democratic achievements of the Age of Roosevelt.
Though a series of crises, most notably, defeat in Vietnam, an Arab oil embargo, and an economic recession, shook up Americans, polls showed they remained committed to social-democratic ideals. In fact, workers were staging strikes on a scale not seen since the late 1940s. Yet not only did the Democratic Party fail to mobilize them, younger, prominent Democratic politicians such as Coloradan Gary Hart—soon to be known as neoliberals—were turning against the FDR tradition and the New Deal coalition in favor of engaging professionals, women, and minorities.
Meanwhile, corporate executives, already feeling under siege by federal agencies and labor unions, were experiencing a “profits squeeze” due to the emergence of foreign competition (especially from Germany and Japan). Which led key figures to call on their class comrades to wake up, join together, and launch what the British Marxist political scientist Ralph Miliband would call a “class war from above” against government regulation, taxes, labor unions, and what they referred to as the “adversary culture” of environmental and consumer-rights groups, college students, the media, and university intellectuals.
Soon enough, old and new business organizations from the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to the Business Roundtable and the Trilateral Commission (whose members included the future Presidents Republican George H.W. Bush and Democrat Jimmy Carter), undertook major advertising, public relations, and lobbying campaigns calling for deregulation, lower taxes, and reducing the size of government—all in favor of “free enterprise.”
We have endured 50 years of creeping authoritarianism and may well now suffer a fascist-like regime because the Democrats, the once-upon-a-time party of FDR, has forgotten what he said.
At the same time, they not only set out to destroy the labor movement by means both legal and illegal (via union-busting consultants and lawyers), but also to invest in pro-business think tanks, public intellectuals, and both Republican and Democratic politicians. And prominent “super-rich” reactionaries funded efforts to mobilize Christian evangelicals around “culture war” questions like school prayer and abortion and white working people around calls for “law and order.”
If all that was not enough, corporate bosses were moving their operations South and overseas to avoid state regulations, taxes, and union wages. Communities suffered; unions were broken; and wages and benefits were frozen, reduced, or lost. To try to survive, workers, who could not vote to raise their wages, began to vote all the more for conservative politicians who promised to cut taxes.
Unions and environmental and consumer rights groups sought to defend and advance democratic achievements, but the Democratic President Jimmy Carter called for “austerity” and liberating business and turned his back on labor and the environmental and consumer movements in favor of cutting government programs, lowering taxes, and deregulating capital—which effectively paved the way for the so-called “New Right” Republican presidency of Ronald Reagan and the age of neoliberalism.
The story of the ensuing decades is that of continuing class war from above and neoliberalism. Of course, we expected it from capital and conservative Republicans. But what Carter the Democrat started, the next Democratic President, Bill Clinton, pursued aggressively. He too betrayed labor by pushing Congress to enact the North American Free Trade Agreement that further devastated American manufacturing in the Northern states. That was just the start. He deregulated the communications industry, enacted a mass incarceration crime bill, ended “welfare as we know it,” (a.k.a Aid to Families with Dependent Children—which began with FDR), and further deregulated banking. When the next Democrat President, Barack Obama, won the White House in 2008 he not only did not fight for the EFCA (Employee Free Choice Act) which would have made it far easier to create a union.
He also failed to prosecute Wall Street bankers for possible crimes that led to the Great Recession of 2008-2009. Obama pushed through a healthcare bill, the Affordable Care Act, that gave huge concessions and profits to the pharmaceutical and health insurance industries, and attempted to push through a bill creating a Trans-Pacific Free Trade Partnership.
At the same time, in state after state, conservatives have acted to override or circumvent a woman’s right to choose by enacting laws intended to make abortions almost impossible to secure. In state after state, Republicans have sought to suppress the votes of people of color, the poor, and students by enacting voter ID laws. And after years of trying, they finally succeeded in getting a conservative Supreme Court to disembowel the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Plus, in state after state, the corporate and conservative rich have smashed labor unions and effectively suppressed the voices of workers by enacting so-called right to work laws—even, as in Wisconsin in 2011, rescinding the collective bargaining rights of public employees.
There have been movements from the bottom up: Wisconsin Rising, Occupy, The Fight for $15, the Moral Monday Movement, the anti-fracking and block-the-pipelines campaigns, and Black Lives Matter. They raised hopes, but they failed to garner the active support of the Democratic Party.
Notably in 2015 one major poll showed that the majority of Americans wanted radical change. Yes, RADICAL change. But the Democratic Party both in 2016 and 2020 found ways to deny the most radical candidate, Bernie Sanders, the nomination. I truly believe Bernie could have beaten Donald Trump both times. But working people, the working class, was, to put it mildly, really fed up with the party that had once been the party of the American working class, that had worked to empower labor and the working class.
Polling continually shows that the working class wants what FDR proposed in 1944. And yet neither party is speaking to working class aspirations. The Republican Party has been speaking to and rallying working-class anxiety and anger. The Democrats have been speaking to professional and upper-middle-class concerns.
We have endured 50 years of creeping authoritarianism and may well now suffer a fascist-like regime because the Democrats, the once-upon-a-time party of FDR, has forgotten what he said: “As of today, fascism and communism—and old-line Tory Republicanism—are not threats to the continuation of our form of government. But I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, then fascism and communism, aided, unconsciously perhaps, by old-line Tory Republicanism, will grow in strength in our land.”
What should the answer to the first question teach Democrats and other anti-fascist Americans about responding to the answer to the second question? That the only way to confront a mortal national crisis and save American democratic life is to do what Americans, with all of their faults and failings, did in the 1770s, 1860s, and 1930s and 60s. Act to radically enhance American freedom, equality, and democracy.
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Last Night the Cord Connecting Us to FDR Was Snapped
Everything is up for grabs now, including the basic entitlement programs that defined the New Deal. It’s time to look for where the next huge realigning New Deal-sized thing will come from.
Nov 06, 2024
I am, of course, sad.
I had hoped, almost more than I let myself really feel, that America was about to elect a smart Black woman president of the United States, moving us further down the path that we have haltingly followed throughout my life. Instead, quite knowingly, we elected someone who stood for the worst impulses in our history. I think the next four years—and perhaps longer—will be very hard on many fronts. One is the concern of this newsletter, climate and energy, where we can expect the oil industry to have carte blanche.
But I actually think the message and the moment is much deeper than that. What happened last night was that the cord that stretched back to FDR snapped. It had been badly frayed, especially in the Reagan years, but the Depression and World War II had been such deep and defining events that the formula that got us through them—a kind of solidarity at home and abroad—more or less held. No more.
Everything is up for grabs now, including the basic entitlement programs that defined the New Deal. (If you haven’t read Project 2025 this would be a good day to start). In foreign policy terms it’s all far more complicated, and has been from Vietnam through Gaza—but today is a bad day to be Ukrainian, Taiwanese, or a Palestinian on the West Bank. Can things get worse? I think they can, and I think we will find out, here and around the world. But I don’t think it will last either, because the promises on which this new MAGA order are built are mostly nonsense.
And I also think the sun rose this morning—there was a leaden sky in the Green Mountains of Vermont when I went out to walk the dog, but I could sense the sun behind it.
And in that sunrise there is for me the hint of where that next huge realigning New Deal-sized thing will come from. The reshaping of our energy system—to cope with climate change, and to reflect the rock-solid fact that we live on an Earth where the cheapest way to make power is to point a sheet of glass at the sun—may offer, if we are clever and good-hearted, a new basis on which to remake the world.
More local, more peaceful, less controllable by oligarchs and plutocrats. I don’t know if we can make it—the headwinds are stronger than they were yesterday—but I know we can try. And I know that only this project is big enough in scale to give us a real chance at a fresh start.
That’s what this community will continue to focus on, and I’m glad you’re a part of it.
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