Since his election, Trump has dampened his attacks on Hillary Clinton, and both he and President Obama have conscientiously adhered to a personal nonaggression pact. But through his tumultuous transition, Trump has made little attempt at national reconciliation. At his post-election rallies, he has continued to launch sweeping denunciations of the news media; he’s regularly directed disparaging tweets toward voices critical of him (an Indiana union leader, Bill Clinton, the cast of Broadway’s Hamilton) and belittled the intelligence community’s conclusions about Russian hacking; he’s made the inflammatory and unfounded accusation that “millions of people … voted illegally”; and he’s claimed “a historic electoral landslide victory”—even though his electoral college margin ranked in the bottom fourth of elections to date, and even though he lost the popular vote by more votes than any winner ever. In short, in tone and temperament, the distance between Trump the president-elect and Trump the presidential candidate has been vanishingly small.
Simultaneously, Trump has appointed a Cabinet and White House staff that braid the competing factions of the Republican Party, but offer virtually no outreach to voters beyond them. His nominations for most Cabinet agencies—as well as for the Office of Management and Budget and the Environmental Protection Agency—point toward Trump launching a much more ideological crusade to retrench government than he stressed during the campaign. “He is appointing people who are ideologically conservative in a way that will sometimes run counter to what his populist and nationalist [voter] base is all about economically,” veteran Democratic pollster Geoff Garin told me.
All of this helps explain why recent surveys signal Trump is on track to enter the White House facing more initial resistance in public opinion than any president since modern polling began.
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