Podcast host Joe Rogan last week bemoaned the state of President Donald Trump’s increasingly brutal and militarized mass deportation campaign.
“I did not ever anticipate seeing that on TV on a regular basis,” Rogan said, referring to images of Trump “ripping parents out of their communities.”
“I really thought they were just going to go after the criminals,” added Rogan, who sports heterodox political views but used his hugely popular show to endorse Trump on the eve of the 2024 election.
There are two ways to look at Rogan’s comments. One is: How in the world did Rogan not think Trump would do this? While campaigning, Trump spoke openly about how expansive and heavy-handed this initiative would be. As far back as 2015, he approvingly cited Dwight Eisenhower’s brutal deportation campaign.
But the other is: Maybe Rogan isn’t alone. Maybe the extraordinary nature of what Trump is doing, on many fronts, is starting to set in and casual political followers are beginning to notice he’s going further than they countenanced.
There’s a certain conventional wisdom right now that, while what Trump is doing is extreme, it’s pretty much what he promised. The American people voted for this — or at least 49.8% of them.
But it’s worth calling that conventional wisdom into question.
In fact, on several key fronts, large numbers of Americans didn’t seem to fully anticipate what Trump is now doing – or at least, the extent of it.
Most Americans claim it’s what they expected, but …
Polling during Trump’s second term has generally shown most Americans at least claim to be unsurprised by what the president is doing.
An AP-NORC poll in April showed 71% of Americans said Trump’s first few months had been mostly what they expected. A CBS News-YouGov poll earlier this month showed more said Trump is doing “the same things he promised in the campaign” (52%) than said he was doing “different things” (48%).
But these numbers might not tell the whole story.
For one, people might not like to admit they were wrong about what Trump would do. Admitting Trump defied your expectations would imply that you got things wrong.
And two, the CBS poll isn’t a particularly strong affirmation of Trump keeping his promises. It’s a very low bar to say Trump has generally done what he promised, and nearly half of Americans say he hasn’t.
Fully 53% of independents and even about 1 in 5 Republicans say Trump isn’t doing what he promised. Those are large numbers.
And very notably, the percentage of Americans who say Trump is clearing that low bar has dropped significantly. The percentage who say he’s doing the “same things he promised” has declined from 70% in February to 61% in April to 52% this month.
That would suggest large numbers of people have gradually come to believe this wasn’t what the country signed up for.
The specific policies
Between the 2024 election and Trump’s inauguration, CNN, New York Times-Ipsos and Reuters-Ipsos polling tested a number of expectations for Trump’s policies in his second term.
And in many cases, the American people were directionally right in what they predicted. The polls showed huge majorities thought it was at least plausible that Trump would deport millions of people, levy large tariffs and pardon lots of January 6, 2021, defendants, as Trump promised. A large majority also thought he would probably try and use the Justice Department against his foes.
But even in some of these cases, it’s not difficult to see how Americans might be surprised by the extent of what Trump has done so far.
For instance, the Ipsos polls showed two-thirds of Americans said it was at least “somewhat likely” that Trump would use the government to investigate and prosecute his foes, as he’s now done in the cases of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
But fewer than 4 in 10 said it was “very likely.”
And the polls showed many or most Republicans wagered he wouldn’t do it. The Reuters-Ipsos poll showed as many as 69% of Republicans said Trump was “not likely” to use DOJ to go after his enemies.
The story is similar, if less pronounced, with deportations.
While a slight majority said Trump ordering mass deportations was at least “very likely,” according to the Reuters-Ipsos poll, nearly half rated it only “somewhat likely” or “not likely” – including half of Republicans.
Just 31% of Americans said it was “very likely” that Trump would increase tariffs on China and Mexico, which he has done.
The polling on Trump’s January 6 pardons is also worth raising
The CNN poll showed Americans predicted 78%-21% that Trump would pardon most people convicted of crimes for the attack on the Capitol, as Trump suggested he would.
But he didn’t just pardon most people; he pardoned virtually everyone – including hundreds convicted of assaulting police and several convicted of seditious conspiracy.
And he did so after providing tons of mixed messages about his intentions, at some points suggesting the pardons would be reserved for nonviolent offenders.
The conclusions
The throughline here seems to be that lots of people thought it was possible Trump would do these things, but they didn’t necessarily see them as being especially likely.
A likely reason why? Trump says lots of things, and many of them never come to fruition. He’s spent years inviting people to pick and choose what to take seriously and what to take literally. It’s a neat political trick that allows people to believe what they want and to ignore the rest by dismissing it as bluster.
And the total picture suggests that people are indeed seeing things they didn’t fully expect – and now don’t like. On a plethora of issues, a majority of Americans have said Trump is going “too far,” and that includes many who voted for him. Americans generally liked the idea of Trump’s mass deportation policy, but more recent polls show most don’t like how he’s gone about it.
A Pew Research Center poll from June is a case in point.
Nearly half of Americans (48%) said Trump’s actions were worse than they expected, compared to about 2 in 10 who said they were better than expected.
All of which would suggest it’s hardly just Rogan who’s been unpleasantly surprised.