For the first time since 2022, the economy has contracted. That means President Donald Trump inherited an economy on the rise, and instead of helping things along with good conservative policy, he opted to push us toward recession entirely on his impulses and stubbornness with tariffs.
Meanwhile, the administration and its allies are covering their ears and screaming to the contrary. MAGA continues to hide behind Trump's supposed "massive" mandate that never existed, as much as those believers want to insist otherwise to justify Trump's radical policies.
Voters aren't biting. Trump's job approval rating is plummeting as America feels the effects of one unpopular policy after another. In fact, his 100-day approval rating is the lowest of any president in the last 80 years.
Trump and his allies are overstepping the boundaries the American people gave them, but the president doesn't care. Republicans should.
If the president had an overwhelming mandate, voters wouldn't be so quick to push his approval rating underwater. Polls indicate that as few as 39% of Americans approve of Trump's actions. If Americans truly elected him to implement the radical change he claims, they'd have more of a stomach for watching him do it.
Politicians almost always overextend what they were elected to do. More often than not, our presidents are elected because they're the lesser of two evils. The concept of mandates is pretty shaky and usually only applies to Congress when Americans give one party a majority.
The funny thing is, Republicans also control Congress and are positioned to turn Trump's policies into law. Instead, they're doing nothing.
Trump and Vice President JD Vance view an electoral victory as the American people's unconditional endorsement of everything the victor believes in.
In a rather ridiculous X thread in April, Vance charged that people who object to the administration's approach to deportations "want to nullify the results of a democratic election."
I'm not sure if he even realizes the implications of what he has said here. Vance seems to believe that if you win a democratic election, by even a slim margin, then you have a license to do whatever you want.
Americans did not elect Trump to impose his complete worldview on the country. They elected him because, at that moment in time, the country trusted Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris to fulfill the duties of the presidency. And now it appears Americans do not like how Trump fulfills those duties.
The Vance approach to elections would mean that the Supreme Court justices who told President Joe Biden he could not unilaterally cancel student loan debt were nullifying election results, or the courts that struck down Biden's forced vaccinations campaign were going against a voter mandate.
While Trump doesn't have carte blanche to do what he wants, we must admit he is being the kind of president we knew he would be. After narrowly winning, Trump is a lame-duck president who is taking the liberty to implement his vision for America, even if it hurts his popularity or our country.
Nowhere is that clearer than with tariffs.
One of the few policy positions Trump has held for a long time, including his first term, was the idea that tariffs can do good for the American economy. Now that he is free of the constraints of winning elections and has been blessed with autonomy by the Republicans in Congress, Trump can finally test out how his theories on trade work in practice.
So far, his actions are destructive and antiquated. We're watching the economy contract and the stock market plummet, but soon we will also see prices on many goods rise in response to the Trump tariffs.
It's funny to say, but Americans would be far happier with first-term Trump, whom the Republican establishment contained and kept in check.
In his second term, Trump's actions are so unpopular that the likelihood of Republicans winning in the coming elections is plummeting. Republican politicians would be wise to admit that Trump is overreaching what America elected him to do, which is simply not to be Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. That is their mandate.
Dace Potas is an opinion columnist for USA TODAY and a graduate of DePaul University with a degree in political science.