Americans voted for Trump, but don't support his agenda
In a press conference in the Oval Office with President Donald Trump last week, Elon Musk, the tech billionaire and the president's senior adviser, was asked whether the administration's sweeping cuts to government programs reflected the will of the voters. Musk insisted that the American people had "voted for major reform" and that the administration was simply delivering on that "mandate."
But with the severity and scope of the administration's actions rapidly ramping up — including looming mass federal firings and a tariff war that threatens price hikes for key goods such as groceries, cars and electronics — it's worth asking how much the public actually supports what the White House is doing. Looking at all the polls that have been released since Trump took office, we find that while Americans express support for some of Trump's immigration policy and broad government reform in principle, they oppose most of what he has done in his first month as president.
To gauge support for Trump's policies and actions, I began by combing through every publicly available political poll that has been released since he took office on Jan. 20. Specifically, I was looking for any question that asked respondents if they supported* an action that Trump had taken or promised to take. As of Feb. 25 at 2 p.m. Eastern, this review yielded over 270 questions from 49 different polls. 538 has made the data for this analysis publicly available here, and we will be revisiting this list throughout Trump's term.
Immigration
By far the most polled-on issue area was immigration. I found 63 questions asking about Trump's immigration policies, ranging from such topics as the deportation of undocumented immigrants who have been accused of committing violent crimes (supported by 89 percent of voters, according to an Ipsos/Washington Post poll conducted Feb. 13-18) to the removal of undocumented immigrants who arrived to the U.S. as children (44 percentage points underwater, 70-26 percent, according to the same poll) to whether immigrants removed from the country should be held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, while they await transfer to their home countries (average support of just 37 percent across three polls).
https://abcnews.go.com/538/americans-voted-trump-support-agenda/story
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