The Pretty Prudent American Public
Turns out that most Americans do not like being expansionist assholes on the global stage.
It’s been a busy ten days for President Trump on the foreign policy front. He froze nearly all U.S. foreign aid. He sanctioned Colombia for a hot minute. He proposed the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Gaza. He threatened Denmark over Greenland and Panama over their canal. He kept talking about Canada becoming the 51st state. He renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
Let’s be honest, at this point Trump is getting awfully close to sounding like President Esposito of San Marcos:
For Trump’s diehard supporters, this all sounds great. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt repeatedly talks about the “overwhelming mandate” that Trump received at the polls in November.1 Vice President JD Vance bragged to the GOP House caucus about, “this cultural moment we’ve been having where people see Republicans as the answer." The Trump administrations continues to insist that the American people broadly support their policies.
Is this actually true, however? Have Americans embraced Trump’s bullying approach to the rest of the world?
Turns out the answer is “not so much.”
First, look at Trump’s overall favorability numbers. The good news for Trump is that he is still above water on favorable/unfavorable, which was not a common occurrence during his first term. The bad news is everything else. FiveThirtyEight’s G. Elliott Morris notes, “Trump's initial net approval rating of +7 percentage points is lower than that of any newly elected president since World War II, with one exception: Trump himself during his first term.” Gallup’s Megan Brenan goes further, concluding, “Trump remains the only elected president with sub-50% initial approval ratings, and his latest disapproval rating (48%) is three percentage points higher than in 2017, marking a new high for inaugural ratings.”
Gallup’s chart doesn’t lie:
Reuters/Ipsos finds Trump trending downwards in his overall popularity after just one week on the job. On January 21st they had Trump with 47% approval and 39% disapproval. A week later, he’s back to his familiar underwater territory at 45% approval and 46% disapproval.
Now this could be for one of a number of reasons, including simple mean reversion. Is there any way to know whether Americans support Trump on Greenland or Panama or the Gulf of Mexico?
Well, yes, pollsters have asked Americans about a bunch of these policies. And it turns out that they’re even more unpopular than Trump himself.
For example, the Reuters/Ipsos poll found that Americans disapprove of Trump’s “Gulf of America” move by 70% to 25%. Let me repeat that: 70% oppose and only 25% support the move. In an ostensibly polarized country, that’s pretty strong opposition! It’s even less popular than ending birthright citizenship — which is still very unpopular, with 59% opposed and only 36% supporting). A solid majority of Americans also oppose placing tariffs on Canada (60%), Mexico (55%), and the rest of the world (54%).2
Other polls back up the Reuters/Ipsos results. On Greenland, USA Today has some bad news for President Trump:
Even for an elected president with a track record of surprising proposals, Trump's floated suggestion to take over the Arctic territory was met with widespread shock, according to an exclusive new USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll….
Of 1,000 people polled from Jan. 7 to Jan. 11, 53% didn't support acquiring Greenland, 29% thought it was a good idea but didn't think it could realistically happen, and just 11% said the Trump administration should do everything it can to make it a reality….
Gray Holland, 23, cast his ballot for Trump in November in the hopes Trump would cut funding for Ukraine and crack down on immigration. But taking over Greenland, Holland said, seemed like a bad joke.
"I thought it was funny at first, him joking about that idea," said Gray, who lives in Cary, North Carolina, and works in sports tickets operations. "But once he started actually talking about military deployment … no, I cannot get behind that."
The Daily Mail also put a poll in the field this month and came away with similar results:
Less than one in three, or 32 percent, of registered voters, want Canada and the Panama Canal to become a U.S. territory.
Meanwhile, only 28 percent want to see the U.S. buy Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark where there are growing calls for independence….
About two-thirds of poll respondents don't want military action in Canada or Greenland.
But, Americans show a higher willingness to use aggression to take control of the Panama Canal with one in five supporting the move compared to the 58 percent that oppose it.
Look, I’m sorry, but if the use-of-force option that garners the most support is 20 percent in favor and 58 percent opposed, that’s not a popular policy. And this is before Americans learn that 85% of Greenlanders polled oppose becoming part of the United States.
The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake looked at other polling last week and noted that not even Republicans are super-keen about these ideas: “The only idea that got majority-Republican support in the polling is taking the Panama Canal, but just 29 percent agreed with that idea ‘strongly’ in the Reuters-Ipsos poll. Only 8 percent of Republicans felt ‘strongly’ about pressuring Denmark to sell Greenland. And just 39 percent of Republicans agreed that the United States has the ‘right’ to expand its territory.”
Quinnipiac’s latest poll also shows opposition to the acquisition of Greenland with 55% opposed and only 28% support.
It’s not all sweetness and light with the American people. Quinnipiac’s poll also showed that, “a majority of voters (60 percent) approve of sending U.S. troops to the southern border with Mexico to enforce border security, while 36 percent disapprove.” Still, the striking thing in the polling data this month is that a solid majority of Americans do not want the Trump administration to try to absorb Canada or Greenland or any territory for that matter. They really don’t like renaming the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. None of the moves towards territorial expansion are popular with the American public.
In other words, the American people are pretty prudent — far more so than Trump himself. If he wants to take action that “expands our territory,” he’s not even bringing his MAGA base along with him. Because it turns out that most Americans are uninterested in acting like a belligerent asshole on the global stage.
Trump won but it was far from an overwhelming mandate.
Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris climate change accords is also viewed unfavorably, with 56 percent opposed and 39 percent support.
Your column is misnamed. The public is not prudent, Americans are the most ignorant population in the world. They were all warned about rRump, but they voted for him, or did not vote at all (woman+Black=no vote). "Prudent" after he TOLD us what he would do is not "prudent," it's STUPID!!!!!
Huh. I thought belligerent assholery was kind of America's thing now.