The Pluralistic Ignorance of the Trump Opposition

Institutions are failing to stand up for their principles. That does not mean Americans as a whole are not resisting what is happening.

Photo by m. on Unsplash

2025 has been a God-awful year for believers in American institutions. Whether it’s the legislative branch or higher education or well-connected law firms, prominent organizations have been all too willing to accede to the Trump administration’s every whim regardless of merit. The specter of Trump using the government to exact revenge on those who have wronged him has been enough to generate appeasement from Columbia University and Paul Weiss, to name just two of these institutions.

The Trump White House and Trumpworld more generally have been positively giddy about these developments. The crumbling of small-l liberal institutions and organizations — especially compared to how these institutions reacted in 2017 — has to feel good for them. It establishes a precedent for other universities, law firms, corporations, state governments, and civil society pillars to go gently into that good night and do whatever the Trump White House demands of them.

For those of us who do not want to live in a competitive authoritarian state, the past week has been particularly dispiriting. It feels as though many other organizations are poised to accede to Trump’s threats — and that these victories, in turn, will bolster Trump’s political standing. The lack of large-scale resistance to Trump’s agenda has a finality to it that can cause despair.

And this is the moment when the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World would like to discuss the notion of pluralistic ignorance.

Pluralistic ignorance is a social psychology phenomenon in which people who hold a majority opinion are unaware that it is a majority opinion — or, similarly, when people believe that a minority view is actually a majority viewpoint. For example, if the media keeps reporting that Donald Trump is not inspiring the kind of organized opposition that he did during his first term, or the same underwater polling that happened eight years ago, some folks might infer that the majority of Americans support Donald Trump.¹

When one actually looks at public opinion and protests over the past two months, however, a rather different picture emerges. While the media vibes might suggest that Trump is on a roll, the data say he’s in trouble.

Let’s start with public opinion. Nate Silver crunched the polling numbers for Trump’s first two months in his second term and, hey, guess what, he’s becoming steadily more unpopular:

In our approval rating tracker, Trump started out at a +11.6 net approval rating, a much better opening number than in his first term. But now, he’s in the red at -2.2. So there’s actually been a fair amount of movement.

From the first full day of his presidency, Jan. 21, through yesterday — March 21: conveniently exactly two months later — Trump’s net approval rating has declined by 13.8 points, so around 7 points per month. A president can’t afford that rate of decline for long….

A president’s disapproval rating typically increases early on, partly because some voters who were initially on the fence and say they were undecided, perhaps out of a sense of hopefulness for a new president, instead begin to tell pollsters they disapprove of his performance. That’s been true for Trump 2.0, as it has been for all recent presidents.

Sometimes, a president’s approval rating is relatively unaffected, however: his disapprovers come out of the woodwork, but his supporters stay with him. In this case, however, Trump has also lost some support among voters who supported him earlier on: his approval rating has declined by a couple of points….

The bad news for Trump… is that lame duck presidents typically have both a lower average and a lower floor. In their first terms, the average president since Truman who went on to serve a second term had an average approval rating of 58.0 and a floor of 47.1. In these presidents’ respective second terms, however, the average was 48.0 and the floor was 37.7. In particular, Johnson, Nixon and George W. Bush saw their numbers crater in their second term after their re-election (by landslide margins in the case of Johnson and Nixon). I’ve argued before that Bush is an ominous precedent for Trump and a hopeful one for Democrats. In the second (lame duck) term, even partisans might not prop up a president if they think it might be to their advantage to throw him under the bus instead.

Trump’s fading popularity might have something to do with how his policies have done a number on investor and consumer confidence. Over at Good Authority, Michael Tesler notes that Trump’s efforts to blame bad economic news on Biden ain’t working:

Trump has repeatedly tried to blame Biden for the sharp declines in the stock market and consumer confidence in March 2025. But… YouGov polling shows that more Americans think Trump is responsible for the state of the economy….

With more Americans now blaming Trump, his greatest first-term strength has quickly become one of his biggest liabilities. Most Americans approved of how Trump handled the economy throughout his first presidential term but several polls conducted over the past few weeks found that Trump’s net economic approval rating (approve minus disapprove) is at least 10 percentage points underwater.

So Trump is losing popular support, and is now underwater on what was his strongest policy issue during his first term.

But is Trump’s waning popular support and unpopular policies translating into social mobilization against MAGA? It sure seems so based on the numbers of people wanting to talk to their representative. Erica Chenoweth, Jeremy Pressman, and Soha Hammam make a persuasive case. Not only are there protests, but Americans are also making their displeasure known through their pocketbook:

In February 2025 alone, we have already tallied over 2,085 protests, which included major protests in support of federal workers, LGBTQ rights, immigrant rights, Palestinian self-determination, Ukraine, and demonstrations against Tesla and Trump’s agenda more generally. This is compared with 937 protests in the United States in February 2017, which included major protests against the so-called Muslim ban along with other pro-immigrant and pro-choice protests. Coordinated days of protest such as March Fourth for Democracy (March 4), Stand Up for Science (March 7), rallies in recognition of International Women’s Day (March 8), and protests demanding the release of Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil suggest little likelihood of these actions slowing down. These are all occurring in the background of a tidal wave of lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s early moves.

Historically, street protest and legal challenges are common avenues for popular opposition to governments, but economic noncooperation — such as strikes, boycotts and buycotts — is what often gets the goods. Individual participation is deliberately obscure, and targeted companies may have little interest in releasing internal data. Only the aggregate impacts are measurable — and in the case of Tesla, Target and other companies, the impacts so far have been measurable indeed.

Look, I’m not saying things are great right now. I’d like to see civil society institutions show some more backbone. What I’d also like to see, however, is the end of pluralistic ignorance about Donald Trump. Because no matter what MAGA and the media says, Donald Trump is an unpopular president who is causing an awful lot of Americans to mobilize against him. And the trendlines are moving against him.

1. In this instance, another thing that can feed pluralistic ignorance is Republicans repeatedly lying about Trump having won the 2024 election with an overwhelming mandate.