My favorite opinion poll of recent times was the one which showed that Donald Trump is disliked by more than 90 percent of Danes. This is a glorious achievement and one of which the President should be proud, and perhaps boast about from time to time – averse though he may be to boasting, of course.
This was the lowest favorability rating for Trump anywhere in Yerp and I suppose is partly occasioned by his determination to pry Greenland from the grasp of these ineffably smug Scandis because they have no idea what to do with it and have mismanaged its meager affairs for decades.
A personal admission: I cannot stand Danes. When opinion polls come around, they are always the people who pronounce themselves the happiest – but delve a little deeper and you discover that it is a shroud of happiness which conceals a philosophically and sexually confused interior, a kind of mash-up psychosis drawn from the existential bleakness of Søren Kierkegaard and the deeply weird sex case Hans Christian Andersen, with his Thumbelina, Little Match Girl and other such very underage temptresses (such as that mermaid thing).
By coincidence, Søren and Hans are the only two Danes of whom the world has ever heard, other than maybe Niels Bohr. Denmark has great material riches, admittedly – the consequence of being liberated from tyranny by the UK and US and never having had to do anything more onerous than bake the occasional pastry or gut a herring. But how they bask in that wealth, doling out the usual liberal largesse to all and sundry – until immigrants threaten to take it away, whereupon, overnight, the entire Danish population turns into the Waffen-SS.
The most famous Danish expression, incidentally, is “hygge,” which relates to the feeling of warmth and contentment one experiences in the seconds before committing suicide.
And have you ever seen their skin, the Danes? It is taut and has a strange pearly luster, as if they had all been lacquered or baked with a glaze. They are perhaps the cosseted saps the Vikings left behind when the others set sail to conquer Yerp 1,400 years ago.
But that’s enough about Danes. The President’s approval rating doesn’t climb above 50 percent anywhere in Western Europe. The Brits (along with the Italians) are the least hostile, perhaps because we share his ambivalence toward our continent: a place one recalls with gentle affection but at the same time – in its present incarnation as a stupefied, complacent receptacle for the dissemination of dunderheaded, postrational wokery – from which one also somewhat recoils. It is a little like Sausalito, California: a beautiful idyll to look at, and then you talk to the mimsy, reality-defying locals in their cholesterol-free keffiyehs and end up wishing a lethal plague upon the place. Europe is, in a way, one giant Marin County – all scenic houseboats, picturesque seascapes, pretentious fusion restaurants, coconut matcha lattes and an utterly witless progressivism which will soon see it all turn to rot. And without even a No Name Bar for sanctuary.
But then the President’s approval rating in your neck of the woods isn’t much better, is it? The midterms beckon, balefully. In 2017, Trump broke the record for the lowest approval rating for a president after one year in office and he may be about to do it again.
But then, Joe Biden didn’t do much better after his first year. Perhaps they are a uniquely awful duo; yet it is the speed with which the public turned against them that is the crucial issue here. One moment, the people were happy to vote for them; the next, the people were thoroughly pissed. And so the question becomes: is this actually nothing to do with the qualities of Trump or Biden, and more to do with the public?
Trump is, at present, losing that public. A populist who is no longer popular becomes a rather wretched oxymoron. It is the young folk, God bless them, who are deserting him with the greatest celerity – and remember, it was their support that edged him home against the staggeringly dim-witted Kamala Harris. An unexpected 43 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds voted for Trump in the election, but recently the President’s favorability rating among that demographic has declined from +10 to -46, according to CNN.
Why have they gotten so heartbreakingly disillusioned? Some observers have suggested the random aggression towards Venezuela (and by extension Cuba) has made them think again, or perhaps the murky Epstein business, but I don’t think I really buy that. Is it perhaps a youthful capriciousness occasioned by seeing Zohran Mamdani present a polar-opposite populism in New York? I reckon that may have more to do with it, although it is not the full explanation by some margin. Trump also seems to have lost, at least temporarily, a good proportion of his bedrock MAGA support, which is angered by such fripperies as the granting of 600,000 visas to Chinese students and the more pressing business of the cost of living.
And yet, taken in the round, none of this seems to me to add up to quite the level of disillusion seen in the polls. It is hard to argue that, compared to previous holders of the same office, Trump has not delivered. Seen from over here, his tenure might appear often crass and at times deranged, but you would not argue against the suggestion that it has at least been dynamic – and dynamic in the way that was promised. Nonetheless, the voters drift away, either furiously outraged, or in the manner of distraught orphans seeking someone else to play mommy or daddy.
As you have probably gathered, I think the answer lies not with the politicians, but with a change in the electorate. We are accustomed to being told these days that voters are “volatile,” but this is more than mere volatility – and the same sort of process has been happening in Britain and mainland Europe.
In September, Sir Keir Starmer, the British Prime Minister, recorded the lowest-ever approval rating from the voters in history. Now, I yield to nobody in my dislike of his Labour government, which has, through cowardice and ineptitude, bankrupted the economy. But from whom did Starmer take that record? His predecessor, Rishi Sunak, a mild and rather agreeable Conservative. And in turn Rishi Sunak took the worst-rating gold medal from the prime minister who preceded him, the strange, misshapen 49-day-wonder Liz Truss, who was kind of Ayn Rand replayed as a farce. And yes, she in turn nicked the crown from her predecessor, Boris Johnson.
Sir Keir’s “loveless landslide” victory in 2024 was said to have been occasioned by widespread, fervent dislike of the Conservatives – and I would not contest that analysis for one moment. What’s remarkable, though, is the speed with which the electorate came to hate Starmer, having just voted for him. It was almost instantaneous. The electorate disapproved even before he’d opened his mouth. The inclination toward disaffection has speeded up and encompasses a far greater swath of the population than was ever previously the case.
Meanwhile in France, Emmanuel Macron is cordially detested by almost everybody. In October a poll suggested he was the least popular French president of the past 50 years. And from whom did Macron steal that crown? Yes, his pudding-faced mentor and predecessor in the role, François Hollande. Hop across the Rhine into Germany and the Chancellor, Friedrich Merz, has a disapproval rating of a whopping 75 percent and the poor bloke has only been in office since May. But then his predecessor, Olaf Scholz, was also magnificently unpopular and his plans to run again as chancellor were scuppered by truly terrible poll ratings.
The usual way to explain this business is to remark, darkly, that the liberal consensus which has bound us together these past 70 or so years has outlived its usefulness: people are sick of the major establishment parties, which is why populists of both right and left have been on the rise in Europe – from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic – and in the US.
I don’t doubt that this is true, so far as it goes. But the argument falls down when you study the case of your own President, who was precisely the answer to those prayers that a corrupt and ineffective establishment needed to be thrown over. Well, the voters got what they supposedly wanted – and look, they hate him, too. It’s a lesson that will one day be learned over here by our own insurrectionists, Reform UK, who currently lead the polls and are on course to win the next general election. Already, the leader of the party has a disapproval rating which exceeds 60 percent. Just wait until he takes office.
The truth is we have become ungovernable. Assuaged by decades of peace at home and of a rise in living standards, the voters seem to believe the sunlit uplands are theirs to be attained quite naturally and that all politicians do is mess it up. The disaffection may be with the old order – but it may be even more with the mere notion of order at all, the idea that anybody might have the temerity to govern us. And when we don’t get everything we want, immediately, we have a kind of toddler tantrum. Some of this is the consequence of the heightened state of dissatisfaction thrust upon us by 24-hour news and social media, where every political misstep is blown out of proportion. Some of it is the lower quality of politicians. But mainly it is a mass stupidity and petulance on the part of people who have never experienced real hardship or real tyranny.
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