The past nine months of American politics have been among the most consequential in the modern history of the nation. Rarely there has ever been so many unprecedented actions from the federal government, so many elections where the outcome matters on a national level, or arguably so much division between Americans.
At the front of all this new territory is President Donald Trump, who has served his second term quite controversially for a number of reasons. Let’s look back at some of the things that have happened in the presidency since the start of this school year:
Trump has authorized and overseen foreign military operations that carry questionable legal justifications in the U.S. and undeniably violate international law. He has attacked foreign allies and threatened Greenland with takeover. He has also attempted to consolidate more power in the executive branch by directing the Department of Justice to prosecute his political opponents and concerningly called for the federal government to take control of local and state elections.
Trump delivered poorly on the highly anticipated release of the Epstein files in December 2025, only releasing files with significant redactions after a long trail of statements asserting that the files were a hoax. Additionally, some Democrats have noted that the Justice Department made little effort to communicate with victims and provide them with the justice that they have been demanding.
Trump’s economic policy has been largely ineffective in the past months. Recently, the war in Iran has caused a disruption in the oil market so strong that some experts predict that American consumers could feel the effects for months after the war is resolved, and the end of the war seems to be stretching further out of sight than previously thought.
Trump and his administration’s rhetoric toward political opponents has been divisive for many years, but it reached into alarming territory in January, when former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem baselessly described Alex Pretti as a person who “wanted to do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement,” while many more Trump officials, like Stephen Miller, joined in labeling Pretti as a domestic terrorist soon after he was shot and killed. In his short time in office, the president appears to do more damage than good for the nation.
Trump’s presidency will not be ending soon, and the test of how the nation will respond to his actions is constantly ongoing. Trump’s approval rating has been experiencing a general downward trend and has been especially low since the beginning of this year. Trump even managed to find himself in hot water with some of his own loyalists after posting a photo on Truth Social in April seeming to depict himself as Jesus performing a healing miracle. So, how have Americans shown their dissatisfaction, and how should they show it in the future?
The most popular test of Trump’s popularity will be taking place in November in the midterm elections. With midterms looming, Democrats have already secured certain key victories in special elections across the country this year. A Politico analysis of 229 state and federal elections that have taken place since Trump’s inauguration shows Democrat victories in 193 of them. This includes overperformances by Democrats in Republican strongholds, such as Democratic candidate Sam Sutton of New York’s 22nd state Senate District, who won his election in the same district that voted 78% for Trump in 2024.
The pushback has not stopped at election wins; in March, an estimated 8 million people participated in the third No Kings protest, the largest No Kings protest so far and, once again, the largest single-day protest in American history. Many more decentralized protests have taken place in cities across the nation in response to many of Trump’s actions, such as soaring gas prices from the Iranian war.
To be sure, it is not clear how the U.S. will recover from Trump’s divisive rhetoric, ineffective economic agenda, and harmful foreign policy in the future. But what many Americans have been making clear is that they want change to come now; they want to pushback against Trump even if it seems difficult or action seems ineffective.
Any Democrat that wins in the midterm primary needs to answer the call from voters and take the stance against Trump that Americans have been yearning for in the last few months, if not throughout the entirety of Trump’s term. Many of the protests taking place do not just exhibit a dissatisfaction with Trump, but also with Democrats’ inaction toward Trump.
Democrats need to be especially active if they take back control of Congress after the midterms. Voters will be looking to see whether their newly elected representatives deliver on the promises to address concerns about Trump with real attempts to rein in his power-consolidation efforts that have been unsuccessful and unpopular.
While Trump fails working-class Americans repeatedly, Democrats need to respond with more than simply acknowledging his failures. What voters can do now to help the U.S. recover from these shortcomings is to take their sentiments about Trump and translate them in office with representatives who are just as unhappy as we are.
