Are President Donald Trump’s supporters regretting casting their votes for the president?
Sarah Longwell, a longtime Republican and publisher of The Bulwark, said in a piece published Tuesday that she has conducted focus groups of voters across party lines since January.
While many Trump voters “believe they’re getting exactly what they signed up for,” Longwell explained that many Americans who supported Trump are ready to blame him if their problems are not solved soon. She said many voters who backed Trump think he is focusing on a “bunch of crazy things” instead of focusing on the economy.
“They’re here for the liberal tears, and I’m confident that Trump will keep his sky-high approval ratings with the Republican base. But among voters who don’t identify as hard partisans, some are confused and downright worried about what’s happening. These are not members of the resistance,” Longwell wrote in her piece for The Atlantic.
A first-time Trump voter named Zackery suggested he is worried about the recent layoffs spearheaded by Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).
He referred to Trump’s pressure campaign that resulted in the former Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) chief resigning and the administration rehiring federal workers who handled nuclear weapons after mistakenly firing them.
“Firing the FAA director and then having, like, five plane crashes within a matter of, like, two weeks is literally insane,” Zackery said in the focus group, according to Longwell. “Firing the people who handle nuclear weapons, and then realizing who you fired, and then having to be like, ‘Hey, hey, hey, don’t go, we need you’ … Like, that’s crazy.”
Two-time Trump voter, Bobby, signaled he was skeptical about Trump’s moves to rename the Gulf of Mexico and his push to acquire Greenland.
“As far as renaming the Gulf, stuff like that, or buying [Greenland] … I don’t know. It’s just kind of nonsense to me,” he said.
Longwell reported that some voters wanted to see Trump fix the economy—one of his top campaign promises. Recent polls have shown that Trump’s approval rating on his handling of the economy is tanking as grocery prices remain high and as he implements tariffs on imported goods from Mexico, China and Canada.
“ I would like to see him do a little bit more for the economy … because that was one of the platforms that he did run on, that he was going to help the economy,” Holly, a 2020 and 2024 Trump voter from Maine, said in a focus group. “You know, we haven’t really seen that. My grocery prices are still the same, if not higher, than they were.”
Bobby said: “I just worry about the tariffs making everything cost more. Looks like we might have to take some more pain before it gets better, as far as inflation.”
Longwell said on MSNBC last month that Trump supporters are starting to have “buyer’s remorse.”
“I think what we’re starting to see is the very beginning of buyer’s remorse setting in. And the voters that I was talking to both before the election and after the election that are kind of these, we say ‘low information,’ but we just mean people who aren’t tapped into politics all the time,” she said.
“They voted for Donald Trump for one very specific reason: They thought things were too expensive and they still think things are too expensive, but now what you see is they’re like, ‘What is he focusing on? I didn’t vote for this dismantling of the government,’” she added.
Stories by Lauren Sforza
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