Joe Rogan is unpleasantly surprised by Trump’s actions. He is hardly alone

Podcast host Joe Rogan lamented President Donald Trump’s increasingly violent and militarized mass deportation campaign last week.

“I never expected to see this on TV regularly,” 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 displays heterodox political views but has used his wildly popular show to endorse Trump in 2024. on the eve of the election.

There are two ways to look at Rogan’s comments. One of them: How the hell did Rogan not think Trump would do this? On the campaign trail, Trump spoke openly about how broad and difficult the initiative would be. Back in 2015, he cited Dwight Eisenhower’s brutal deportation campaign approvingly.

But the other is this: maybe Rogan isn’t alone. Perhaps the enormity of what Trump is doing on so many fronts is starting to dawn, and casual political followers are starting to see that he’s going further than they thought.

There is some conventional wisdom at this point that while what Trump is doing is extreme, it is essentially what he promised. The American people voted for it—or at least 49.8 percent did.

But it’s worth questioning this conventional wisdom.

In fact, in several important areas, many Americans don’t seem to have fully anticipated what Trump is doing now — or at least the extent of it.

Most Americans say this is what they expected, but…

Polling during Trump’s second term has generally shown that most Americans at least say they are not surprised by what the president is doing.

An AP-NORC poll in April found that 71% of Americans said Trump’s first few months had been what they expected. A CBS News-YouGov poll from earlier this month found that more said Trump is doing “the same things he promised on the campaign trail” (52 percent) than said he is doing “different things” (48 percent).

However, these numbers may not tell the whole story.

First, people may not like to admit they were wrong about what Trump will do. Admitting that Trump has defied your expectations would mean you’ve done it all wrong.

Second, the CBS poll is not particularly strong confirmation that Trump is keeping his promises. It’s a very low bar to say Trump has done what he promised at all, and nearly half of Americans say he hasn’t.

Fully 53% of independents and even about 1 in 5 Republicans say Trump is not doing what he promised. Those are big numbers.

And crucially, the percentage of Americans who say Trump is clearing that low bar has dropped significantly. The percentage saying they are doing what they promised fell from 70% in February to 61% in April to 52% this month.

This would suggest that many people slowly began to believe that this was not what the country signed up for.

Specific policies

From 2024 election before Trump’s inauguration, a CNN, New York Times-Ipsos and Reuters-Ipsos poll tested a number of expectations about Trump’s second-term policies.

And for the most part, the American people were right in what they predicted. Polls showed that an overwhelming majority thought it was at least likely that Trump would win in 2021. January 6 will deport millions of people, impose heavy tariffs and pardon the accused, just as Trump promised. The vast majority also thought he would probably try to use the Justice Department against his enemies.

But even in some of these cases, it’s easy to see how Americans might be surprised by what Trump has done so far.

For example, Ipsos polls found that two-thirds of Americans said it was at least “somewhat likely” that Trump would use the government to investigate and prosecute his enemies, as he is now doing in the cases of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

But less than 4 in 10 said it was “very likely”.

And polls showed that many or most Republicans were betting he wouldn’t. A Reuters-Ipsos poll found that as many as 69% of Republicans said Trump was “unlikely” to use the DOJ to track his enemies.

The story is similar, if less pronounced, with deportations.

While a slim majority said Trump ordering mass deportations was at least “very likely,” nearly half rated it only “somewhat likely” or “unlikely,” according to a Reuters-Ipsos poll, including half of Republicans.

Only 31% of Americans said it was “very likely” that Trump would raise tariffs on China and Mexico, which he did.

It’s also worth raising the poll on Trump on January 6. grace

A CNN poll showed Americans 78% to 21% predicted Trump would pardon most of the people convicted of crimes in the Capitol attack, as Trump has proposed.

But he didn’t just forgive most people; he forgave practically everyone – including hundreds convicted of assaulting police and several convicted of seditious conspiracy.

And he did so after issuing a series of mixed messages about his intentions, at some points suggesting that the pardons would go to non-violent criminals.

Conclusions

A lot of people seem to have thought Trump would do this, but they didn’t necessarily see them as particularly likely.

A likely reason why? Trump says a lot of things, and a lot of them never come true. For many years, he invited people to choose what to take seriously and what to take literally. It’s a neat political trick to get people to believe what they want and ignore everything else, dismissing it as junk.

And the big picture is that people are actually seeing things they didn’t expect at all — and now they don’t like them. On many issues, most Americans said Trump is going “too far,” including many who voted for him. Americans generally like the idea of ​​Trump’s mass deportation policy, but more recent polls show a majority disapprove of how he’s handling it.

For example, a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center in June.

Nearly half of Americans (48 percent) said Trump’s actions were worse than they expected, compared with about 2 in 10 who said they were better than expected.

All this suggests that Rogan was hardly the only one who was unpleasantly surprised.

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