“We are getting crushed!” So exclaimed President Trump to his chief of staff in response to media coverage of the government shutdown, according to The New York Times. This is an accurate description of his political fortunes at the moment. Trump has gone all-in on his demand for border wall funding, and it’s turning out quite poorly for him. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi isn’t budging, and may even thwart his State of the Union address to Congress later this month. Polls consistently show that a majority of voters oppose the wall, while even wider margins oppose shutting down the government to fund it. Now, as the shutdown drags on and its economic consequences grow, Trump’s usually steady approval rating is slipping.

But if Trump thinks he’s getting crushed now, he ought to peek around the corner. The outlook for the remainder of his term is grim—not just for his political prospects, but the country itself. Economists, Wall Street analysts, and even the White House’s own experts are becoming increasingly pessimistic about the economy, which Trump is doing his best to hobble. And the now-divided Congress can’t even manage to fund the government, boding ill for its ability to accomplish much else.



Trump has brought this on himself. He had ample evidence that immigration was not the winning issue that he continues to think it is. In the final weeks before the midterm elections, he attempted to make the contest a referendum on his immigration policy. At a late-October rally in Nevada, he told voters that a Democratic victory “would be a bright, flashing invitation to every human trafficker, drug trafficker,” and that Democrats wanted to give undocumented immigrants health care, welfare, and the right to vote. But voters didn’t listen. In fact, while Trump’s push may have saved a vulnerable Senate seat or two, it had a disastrous impact on the wider electorate. Republican pollster David Winston found that the focus on immigration led undecided voters to break for Democrats by double-digit points.



Trump is consoling himself by suggesting that he will only take a short-term hit because of the shutdown. According to the Times, Trump has told his staff that “he believes over time the country will not remember the shutdown, but it will remember that he staged a fight over his insistence that the southern border be protected.” That may be true, but he’s misreading the extent of public support for the wall. Overall, polling on the wall has remained relatively steady, with support in the low 40s and opposition in the mid 50s.



Trump, rather than his party, is taking the brunt of the blame for the shutdown. Close to half of voters blame him specifically, which explains why his approval rating, which typically hovers in the low 40s, may be dipping into the 30s. While the shutdown has been predictably polarizing on the question of the wall itself—Republicans increasingly support it and Democrats increasingly oppose it—key constituencies that helped elect Trump appear to be abandoning him over the shutdown. An NPR/NewsHour/Marist poll released on Wednesday found that the downturn in his approval rating is being driven by dips in support from suburban men and white evangelicals; his approval rating among Republicans, meanwhile, has dropped from 90 to 83 percent. “For the first time, we saw a fairly consistent pattern of having his base showing evidence of a cracking,” Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Pubic Opinion, told NPR.