Why Trump Isn’t “Failing Fast” and Why Believing He Is Prevents Effective Response

When autocratic consolidation begins, a predictable pattern emerges. Observers see lawsuits filed, court rulings issued, approval ratings underwater, portions of the autocratic agenda stalled or delayed. They conclude the autocrat is failing. The evidence is real, but the interpretation is dangerously wrong.

Virginia Heffernan’s article in The New Republic exemplifies this analytical error. She argues Trump is “Actually Failing Fast” because he’s unpopular, courts are checking him, and extremist figures like Curtis Yarvin have “thrown in the towel.” Her evidence is accurate. Her conclusion misreads what successful consolidation looks like in its first year. Understanding the difference between opposition activity and opposition success determines whether resistance efforts deploy where they can actually constrain power.

The cognitive pattern is understandable. People desperately want to believe resistance is working. However, strategic resistance requires measuring whether opposition activity produces actual constraint on executive power, not just whether it produces activity that feels like progress.

Heffernan cites Trump’s approval ratings as evidence he’s failing fast. The polling data shows something different. Trump’s approval in October 2025 sits at 37-44% depending on the pollster. These numbers fall squarely within his first-term range of 34-49%, where he averaged 41% across four years. During his first presidency, Trump never reached 50% approval, making him the only president since scientific polling began in 1938 to achieve this distinction. Within his second term, his numbers show stabilization rather than decline. Trump started at 47% approval in January 2025, dropped to 37-40% by July, then remained essentially flat through October. This represents a return to his baseline equilibrium after a brief honeymoon, not an accelerating collapse.

The composition of his support reveals stability. Republican approval remains at 91% in October 2025, statistically identical to his first-term numbers. Among his 2024 voters, 85% still approve as of August 2025. His base isn’t leaving.

Being at 40% approval creates constraints compared to high-approval autocrats who operate at 75-80%, but those constraints prove insufficient when key institutions enable rather than check executive power.

The critical error is treating unpopularity as inability to consolidate power. Viktor Orbán faced plummeting approval during his consolidation in Hungary. He won reelection anyway. The question is not whether Trump is popular. The question is whether the opposition controls institutions with power to constrain him despite his unpopularity.

Unpopularity is opposition activity. Constraint on power is opposition success.

This narrative suggests courts are successfully checking Trump’s power through constant rulings against the administration. The Supreme Court data reveals the opposite pattern. Through October 2025, the Court grants Trump’s emergency requests at a 67-83% success rate depending on methodology. The Biden administration faced the identical 6-3 conservative supermajority and received approval on only 31% of its emergency requests.

When district courts ordered reinstatement of 16,000 wrongfully terminated probationary federal employees, the Supreme Court stayed the order 7-2, allowing mass firings to continue. The pattern is consistent. District courts block administration action, Supreme Court grants emergency stay, policy proceeds while appeals wind through courts. By the time final rulings occur months later, the practical impact has already happened.

The Court’s June 2025 decision in Trump v. CASA illustrates how procedural changes expand executive power. Multiple district courts had issued nationwide injunctions blocking Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order.

In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court changed a fundamental rule about how judges can block government actions. Previously, when a federal judge ruled that an executive order was illegal, that judge could stop the policy nationwide.

Now, judges can only protect the specific people who sued in their courtroom. This meant that when one district court blocked Trump’s birthright citizenship order, the policy was only blocked in that state. The administration could proceed with the policy in the other 49 states while the lawsuit continued.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson captured the pattern in her dissent in National Institutes of Health v. American Public Health Association, decided in August 2025. She wrote that the majority’s pattern across cases exhibited “Calvinball jurisprudence with a twist.” Calvinball has only one rule: there are no fixed rules. “We seem to have two: that one, and this Administration always wins.”

When lower court rulings actually stick and the Supreme Court doesn’t block them, the administration simply ignores what judges order. A Washington Post analysis published July 21, 2025, examined 337 lawsuits filed against the Trump administration. Courts had ruled against the administration in 165 of those cases. The administration was accused of ignoring or working around court orders in 57 of those 165 cases, about one-third. The Post documented what it called “dozens of examples of defiance, delay and dishonesty unprecedented in modern presidential history.”

The most dramatic example occurred in March 2025. Federal Judge James Boasberg issued a Saturday temporary restraining order halting deportations of Venezuelan nationals under the Alien Enemies Act. The administration proceeded with flights anyway, deporting 137 people after the court order was issued. Judge Boasberg found probable cause for criminal contempt in a 46-page April 2025 opinion, writing that the administration demonstrated “willful disregard” for his order. The DC Circuit later threw out this finding in August 2025, with two Trump-appointed judges forming the majority.

The administration faced no consequences.

The structural problem is fundamental. The Constitution gives judges no power to compel compliance with their rulings. The executive branch enforces judicial orders. When the executive is the defendant, enforcement relies entirely on voluntary compliance. If the president directs the Justice Department not to enforce a judicial order, judges have no mechanism to force compliance absent congressional impeachment.

This pattern might seem like evidence of failure if we had no comparative examples of autocratic consolidation. The experiences of Hungary under Viktor Orbán and Poland under the Law and Justice Party reveal that everything observers cite as evidence Republicans are failing or stumbling matches the trends of what successful autocratic consolidation looks like during its first year.

Orbán returned to power in Hungary in 2010. Within his first two years, observers who believed resistance was working could point to extraordinary opposition. Hungary faced economic recession requiring an IMF bailout. Orbán’s approval ratings plummeted.

The European Union launched investigations and eventually suspended approximately 18 billion euros in funding. Tens of thousands protested corruption. Any analysis concluding Orbán was “failing fast” in 2011-2013 would have been catastrophically wrong. Orbán consolidated power anyway, transforming Hungary into what political scientists now classify as an “illiberal democracy.” He won rigged reelections in 2014, 2018, and 2022. He remains in power today.

The EU determined in retrospect that it “intervened too little and too late” because it mistook opposition activity for opposition success.

Poland’s trajectory is even more instructive. When the Law and Justice Party won power in 2015, it immediately triggered a constitutional crisis. The Venice Commission declared PiS actions were “Crippling the Tribunal’s effectiveness.”

The EU launched unprecedented Article 7 proceedings. The European Court of Justice issued multiple rulings that Poland ignored. Mass protests erupted. The EU froze 59.8 billion euros in funding. Opposition activity was intense and sustained. PiS remained in power for eight years, successfully captured much of the judiciary, and weakened civil society. Any assessment written in 2016 claiming PiS was “failing fast” would have been wrong. The opposition eventually succeeded in 2023, but only after eight consecutive years of sustained pressure and record 74% voter turnout.

Scholars at the Carnegie Endowment examining U.S. democratic backsliding in August 2025 found that Trump’s actions reflect an “unusually condensed timeline” compared to similar cases like Poland and Hungary. This describes rapidity of consolidation attempts, not failure to consolidate. Academic research shows that implementing a transformative agenda typically requires three to five years for basic institutional control. Trump’s pattern of encountering intense opposition while consolidating institutional control matches what successful autocrats experience in their first year.

Massive public opposition exists but achieves limited success at constraining power because the institutions that should enforce limits have failed. Courts can’t enforce their orders. Gerrymandering and voter suppression have completely titled elections for Republicans at the federal level and Republicans have refused to govern for nearly three decades and the Supreme Court is openly complicit.

Poland’s opposition took eight years to succeed. They maintained pressure until electoral opportunity arrived, then achieved record turnout in 2023. American opposition doesn’t need to wait eight years for federal electoral opportunities while consolidation proceeds. Blue states can deploy power now through state authority, building resistance infrastructure that takes weapons out of corrupt hands.

Understanding that the Supreme Court is captured, that lower courts cannot enforce orders, and that Congress won’t check the president clarifies where effective resistance must come from: state governments. When federal institutions are captured, effective resistance must come through the one check on federal power that the Constitution explicitly preserves: state authority.

States can investigate and criminally prosecute corrupt officials, create ambitious interstate compacts for healthcare, and even coordinate on ordering employers to divert federal withholdings until the federal government passes an audit to address massive fraud, theft, and misappropriation.

Blue states combined would have the world’s first or second largest economy, while no longer subsidizing corrupt red states. These states could be coordinating policies across state lines to create regional blocs that federal power cannot easily penetrate. The fight is not lost, but we need to stop celebrating activity as if it equals success and start building the state-level resistance that can actually constrain power.

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References

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Carrier, M., & Carothers, T. (2025, August 25). U.S. democratic backsliding in comparative perspective. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2025/08/us-democratic-backsliding-in-comparative-perspective

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