In “CNN poll finds majority of Americans say Trump is focused on the wrong priorities,” Jennifer Agiesta, Ariel Edwards-Levi and Edward Wu write at CNN Politics: , “Public opinion on nearly every aspect of President Donald Trump’s first year back in the White House is negative, a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS finds, with a majority of Americans saying Trump is focused on the wrong priorities and doing too little to address cost of living…A majority, 58%, calls the first year of Trump’s term a failure…There’s hardly any good news in the poll for Trump or the Republican Party entering a critical midterm year, with the president’s handling of the economy looming as the defining issue in key House and Senate races…Asked to choose the country’s top issue, Americans pick the economy by a nearly two-to-one margin over any other topic. The poll suggests Trump is struggling to prove that he’s addressing it. And it finds broad concerns over Trump’s use of presidential power and his efforts to put his stamp on American culture…Views of economic conditions have remained stable — and largely negative — for the past two years, with about 3 in 10 rating the economy positively. What’s changed in the latest poll is the increased pessimism about the future: Just over 4 in 10 expect the economy to be good a year from now, down from 56% just before Trump was sworn in last January…A 55% majority say that Trump’s policies have worsened economic conditions in the country, with just 32% saying they’ve made an improvement. Most, 64%, say he hasn’t gone far enough in trying to reduce the price of everyday goods. Even within the GOP, about half say that he should be doing more, including 42% among Republicans and Republican-leaners who describe themselves as members of the “Make America Great Again” movement.” More here.

From “Backlash to Trump has been more severe in his second term” by G. Elliot Morris at Strength in Numbers: “In the first year of Donald Trump’s first term as president in 2017, the share of Americans calling themselves Republicans (or independents who leaned toward the Republican Party) dropped just 2 percentage points — from 42% in 2016 to 40% by Q4 of 2017. I predict it will surprise many people to hear that the Democrats didn’t actually change their advantage in party ID much at all in Trump’s first term, expanding their advantage to +7 in 2018 from +6 in 2016…In Trump’s second term, however, the Republican Party is shedding members at a much higher pace. Gallup released its latest party identification data this week, and the numbers show Republican identification dropped from 46% in 2024 to just 40% in Q4 of 2025 — a 6-point decline, triple the 2-point drop during Trump’s first term…While many pundits covered Trump’s 2024 win as a new dominance for the right in American politics, it’s clear now that the apparent new apex of GOP loyalty was more of a phantom swing, perhaps an election-year shock driven by inflation and an unpopular Democratic president. There were a lot of soft Trump supporters who were willing to identify with the GOP in a moment of incumbent backlash, but didn’t stick around when Trump inevitably did what was all very well predictable ahead of time…III. Will 2026 be another blue wave?…The question now is whether Democrats can convert this party ID advantage into a big midterms victory. They will need to do that if they want to deliver on their promises of reining in Trump. But party ID advantages don’t automatically translate into votes — ask Democrats circa 2010 or 2014. In both years, Democrats held advantages in party identification but lost badly because their voters didn’t show up…But when you combine a 6-point decline in Republican identification with strong generic ballot numbers (and a tendency for the party in the White House to lose ground over the election year — see my post from Tuesday!), sustained special election overperformance, and an engaged base showing up to protests, you have the ingredients for a wave. Redistricting is the big unknown variable for 2026, but of course, that wouldn’t blunt a big Democratic popular vote victory, just the number of seats they win.” Read more here.

n his NYT opinion essay, “Trump Unmasked,” Thomas B. Edsall puts Trump on the couch, quotes some psychological experts, including Ian Robertson, an emeritus professor of psychology at Trinity College in Dublin, who notes, “In a Feb. 12 Irish Times article, “A Neuropsychologist’s View on Donald Trump: We’re Seeing the Impact of Power on the Human Brain,” Robertson described the frenzied opening days of the second Trump administration:Deports manacled immigrants, closes AIDS-prevention programs, starts and stops and restarts a tariffs war, vows to cleanse Gaza of its troublesome inhabitants and demands that all Israeli hostages be released by Hamas by midday on Saturday or he would “let hell break out.”…This activity, Robertson continued, fuels an aggressive, feel-good state of mind, particularly in dominant, amoral personalities such as Trump’s. It also creates a restless, hyperactive state of mind, which, when combined with a feeling of omnipotence, fosters the delusions that you can snap your fingers and sort every problem…”  Edsall comes to the following conclusion: “Over the past week, it felt as though Trump was even more intensely compelled to publicly announce his determination to dominate everything in sight, and anyone who wants to block him had better watch out…Perhaps most spectacularly, during a Jan. 7 interview with four Times reporters, Trump was asked if there were any limits on his global powers…He replied: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”…“I don’t need international law,” he added…Trump may think his own morality and his own mind are the only constraints on his otherwise limitless power, but if we are dependent on either — not to mention Trump’s sense of empathy, compassion or sympathy for the underdog — we are in deep trouble. The nation, the Western Hemisphere and the world at large need to figure out how to place restraints on this ethically vacuous president, or we will all suffer continued and ever-worsening damage.”

Trump’s health care “plan” is the same old nothing burger the GOP has been pushing for decades. As Jonathan Cohn explains in “Trump’s ‘Great Healthcare Plan’ Is Not Great. It’s Not Even a Plan” at The Bulwark: “DONALD TRUMP ON THURSDAY rolled out what he is calling “The Great Healthcare Plan” and the single most important thing to know about it is that it’s not really a plan…A real plan would have details and numbers, plus experts on standby to explain and defend it. It would reflect weeks of behind-the-scenes work, and represent the beginning of a serious, persistent effort to get a bill through Congress. That is not what the White House produced…The online summary is just 350 words and fits on a single printed page. The extended “fact sheet” clocks in at just 825 words. There are days Trump writes more than that in his posts on Truth Social…And it’s not like those 825 words are dense with policy substance. About a third is a summary of some modest—er, “historic”—executive actions Trump has already taken. The rest is a list of ideas either Trump or Republicans in Congress have endorsed before, with no guidance on the specifics that it would take to turn them into legislation….None of this is surprising. Trump has been promising to release plans for “great” health care throughout his two presidential terms, going back to the very first days of his initial campaign when he was launching his crusade to repeal the Affordable Care Act. “I am going to take care of everybody,” Trump boasted in a 2015 CBS News interview. “Everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now.”