In his inauguration speech in January, Donald Trump heralded a new “golden age of America”. “From this day forward,” he said, “our country will flourish and be respected again all over the world.” He promised a manufacturing boom, falling consumer prices and the colonisation of Mars. In his joint address to Congress on 4 March, a triumphant parade of his first two months in office, he repeated his promise: “The golden age of America has only just begun – it will be like nothing that has ever been seen before.” But 50 days into his second term, amid falling approval ratings and economic chaos, there are signs this new American age may not be materialising in quite the way he promised.
The president’s most loyal supporters do not see it that way. His Washington remains a carnivalesque city. Amid the crowds of sacked civil servants protesting in the streets or searching for new jobs, Maga staffers project a brutish nationalism. Many I have spoken to are agog at the speed with which the White House has acted. They like the swagger.
In their view they have much to celebrate. Europe is finally funding more of its own defence. Illegal crossings at the southern border have collapsed. Hamas has released another 25 Israeli hostages alive from Gaza. Volodymyr Zelensky has been forced to pay homage to American munificence and agreed to give up territory to its predatory neighbour to stop the war. They welcome Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (Doge), which they believe has cowed and bloodied the Washington blob.
The administration has held hundreds of immigrants at the Guantanamo Bay military base as part of plans for the mass deportation of millions of undocumented migrants. Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) schemes have been purged from the federal government, and corporations have fallen in line to protect themselves from punishment. All of which aligns with what Trump promised during the campaign.
Even dissent within his administration is minimal. When Trump entered a recent meeting, his cabinet secretaries gave a standing ovation with North Korean synchronicity. John Bolton, Trump’s national security adviser from 2018-2019, told me that “unlike the first term, when the White House leaked like a sieve”, this time it has “been much, much better”. Trump’s second administration is also more ideologically united than the first. Take the economics team. Where once the former Goldman Sachs executive Gary Cohn and the then treasury secretary Steven Mnuchin restrained the president’s protectionism, their second-term successors share Trump’s instincts. Current treasury secretary Scott Bessent was writing op-eds praising tariffs in the Wall Street Journal months before joining the administration. Peter Navarro, the lead on trade, whose influence is much greater in this White House than it was in Trump’s first, has long railed against the World Trade Organisation for enabling other countries to impose higher tariffs on US products than America imposes on theirs. That unity gives his administration a momentum which is independent of its leader’s caprices.
Their mission is also being boosted by a new class of supine media. Jeff Bezos has intimated that his newspaper, the Washington Post, should not oppose Trump with the same vigour as it did during his first term. The White House has remade the presidential “press pool”, selecting a fresh crop of journalists from “alternative media” such as right-wing podcasts and online outlets. Like Trump, the press secretary Karoline Leavitt chastises journalists who ask critical questions. “I now regret giving a question to the Associated Press,” she snapped at an AP reporter who pressed her on tariffs at a briefing on 11 March.
These are, according to the former Trump adviser and influential Maga figure Steve Bannon, “days of thunder [before] years of lightning”. Yet fissures are emerging. The markets are in revolt against Trump’s trade wars. The president has imposed tariffs on Europe and China alongside levies on the US’s two closest trading partners, Mexico and Canada, which he paused and then reimposed again. The judgement from Wall Street has been damning: every gain on the S&P 500 since the election has been eliminated. The US stock market lost $5trn in value in just three weeks. The sell-off could presage a recession, a prospect officials refuse to rule out. The White House argues tariffs will reshore manufacturing and protect American workers from wage-undercutting abroad. But supply chains cannot be rebuilt within weeks or even months.
During his first term, Trump viewed every rise in the stock market as proof of his economic prowess. “The stock market was something he talked about non-stop when we were there the first time,” one former aide in the Trump White House told me. Now, the White House seems happy for stocks to plunge as the cost of the country pivoting away from what they see as an unfair trade system. Trump spoke about a “little disturbance” in his address to Congress and Bessent has dismissed concerns over rising prices, saying that “access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream”.
But according to polling for NBC News, for the first time since Trump took power in 2017 a majority of voters – 54 per cent – disapprove of his handling of the economy, while 51 per cent disapprove of his performance overall. He won in November 2024 partly due to worries over the cost of living and anger over inflation, but Trump chose not to mention during the campaign that tariffs could hike prices in the short and medium term. And yet, “tariffs and higher costs go right to his coalition’s bottom line”, Frank Luntz, the veteran pollster, told me when we met at his condo near the White House.
“His people believe him to a degree that I’ve never seen in an elected official,” he continued. “This is loyalty to the death.” But not all voters are so faithful. Luntz holds weekly focus groups with the slice of the electorate that put Trump in the Oval Office: those who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and switched to Trump in 2024. These “majority makers” have not yet abandoned Trump, he said, but they’re sceptical about what they see. If the tariffs crank up inflation and a recession takes hold – both of which are being predicted by some economists – that uncertainty could harden into anger.
Then there is the hostility of America’s allies. Nationalist parties around Europe have struggled to balance the unpopularity of Trump’s courtship of Vladimir Putin with their close relationship with the White House. Trump’s top chum in the UK, Nigel Farage, is treading a careful line between not criticising his “friend” and recognising Britons’ widespread affinity with Ukraine. The Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni and France’s National Rally have quietly distanced themselves from Trump’s Ukraine policy. Elon Musk’s endorsement of the far-right Alternative for Germany did not give it a bump in the polls before the German election in February. While America First-ers in Washington will care little about what those abroad think of them, the nationalist internationale looks less certain.
Musk has also sparked a backlash. His assault on the federal government through mass firings and cost-cuttings is in theory popular with voters, but a majority of Americans disapprove of him personally. He and secretary of state Marco Rubio got into a well-reported argument over mass firings at the State Department, and he has had to hand out his phone number to irate senators so they can flag mistaken firings – of which there have been many. In the middle of gutting federal agencies, Doge has stalled a clinical trial for cancer, fired those who organise rides to the hospital for veterans and sacked some of the engineers who build America’s nuclear warheads (they were later un-fired).
Angry liberals have vandalised and used Molotov cocktails against Tesla showrooms and charging stations, and set fire to Cybertrucks. Musk’s platform X is flooded with videos of his own company’s burnt-out cars. Republicans are being shouted down at town hall meetings in their constituencies by voters unhappy with Trump’s policies; the party leadership has advised stopping them altogether. “The public sees too much glee and celebration in the dismantling of the so-called deep state,” Luntz told me, which is alienating many. “There’s a humanity to America that still exists.” If Musk follows through on his claim that the only way to bring down the deficit is to gut Medicaid or social security, Trump’s voters could chafe at the direct consequences on their bank balance.
There are also signs that the influential online right – a group of internet activists and podcasters invested in right-wing conspiracy theories – is growing frustrated with the administration. When, in late February, the Department of Justice released files directly to loyal activists which supposedly named the famous associates of the late financier and convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the scheme quickly turned sour. The influencers, realising that the “Epstein files” only contained details already in the public domain, felt betrayed. Steve Bannon, as well as the conspiracy theorist and influencer Candace Owens and the white nationalist Nick Fuentes, all criticised the administration’s stunt, calling it a “nothingburger” and a “disaster”. The online activist Laura Loomer, who travelled with Trump throughout his campaign, called for the attorney general, Pam Bondi, who released the documents, to resign. “She embarrassed our great President Trump,” Loomer posted on X. A risk for Trump is that his team loses its anti-establishment veneer. His supporters could come to look at his administration and see the thing they hate most: the establishment.
It would be a mistake to think the direction of Trump’s second administration will change. “I don’t see a self-correcting mechanism anywhere around the Trump orbit,” Bolton said. He thinks only an event as seismic as a deep recession or Russia marching on Kyiv could lead the White House away from policies such as protectionism.
Freed from considering his re-election (though he has teased the idea of an unconstitutional third term), Trump is governing with more confidence than his first presidency. The institutions that thwarted him then, such as the judiciary, are being undermined. Judges are blocking the administration’s actions most days, but the White House doesn’t always comply with their rulings. A Brown University professor with a valid visa, for instance, has been removed from the country despite a judge declaring the deportation unlawful. This will only increase in frequency: the White House is expanding executive power at the expense of the rule of law.
For now, Republicans in Congress do not want to check Trump’s power and risk retaliation. When Republican congressman Thomas Massie voted against Trump’s budget on 11 March on the grounds it would not address the government’s growing deficit, the president threatened to field a challenger to unseat him when he stands for re-election. The message was clear: you all serve at my mercy. Given that Republicans control both the Senate and House of Representatives, a congressional check on Trump’s power will only emerge once the party leadership becomes disenchanted with the president. Resistance may also come from potential successors – such as the vice-president, JD Vance, and Marco Rubio – if they begin to sense that their own presidential campaigns in 2028 could be jeopardised by his failures.
When Trump surveys Washington from the Oval Office, he sees a city in his control. For now, he is marching on. But under his feet, cracks are emerging – and the contradictions in his movement are becoming apparent.
[See more: The purge of American liberty]
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This article appears in the 19 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Golden Age