How Trump's Agenda Clashes With What Americans Want

The election of Donald Trump has created a misperception that America has lurched far to the right. But as a nation – and on a slate of issues – America is more progressive than ever. Take some glaring examples: Trump, whose election was funded by more than $30 million from the NRA, has vowed to curb background checks for gun purchases, even though more than 90 percent of Americans want background checks applied to all gun sales. In his first week, Trump targeted millions of undocumented Americans for "priority" deportation. But according to a national exit poll, 70 percent of voters want "illegal immigrants" to be granted legal status, with only 25 percent favoring deportation.



With numbers like these, how did Trump ever get elected? His campaign strategy was to stake out multiple, and often conflicting, stances across dozens of issues, tempting voters of all political stripes to convince themselves that the version of Trump they found appealing was the authentic Trump. In fact, Jane C. Timm at NBC News cataloged 141 different Trump positions across 23 major campaign issues – an average of six positions on each – amounting to "the most contradictory and confusing platform in recent history." The strategy worked; Trump won support from a quarter of voters who said they wanted policies more liberal than those of the Obama administration.

As president, Trump has moved to the right. But national polls underscore that an agenda reflective of American priorities would look almost nothing like the policies now being crafted by the White House and Republican leaders in Congress.



On the question of climate change, for example, Trump has unveiled a fossil-fuel-first energy plan, and the White House says it is "committed to eliminating harmful and unnecessary policies such as the Climate Action Plan." Americans strongly disagree with this approach. Seventy-one percent want the U.S. to stick with the Paris Agreement to reduce global climate pollution, including 57 percent of Republicans. Fifty-five percent of the president's own voters believe he should continue the climate-change policies of the Obama administration, and 73 percent want to maintain or increase government support for green energy. "There's a lot of talk about this being the divided states of America," says Annie Leonard, executive director of Greenpeace. "But on some issues we're not divided – a majority of people want the Earth's climate to stay within that temperature range in which human life can continue."

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