Of all the people I meet on my short swing through America’s midwest, the gruff man who lived at a roadside ranch called Hog’s Haven near the Minnesota-Iowa border might have said it best.

Despite the big blue banner on his property declaring “TRUMP: Keeping America Great”, he didn’t want to talk about it. “I’m not into politics, I just put the sign up,” the man said when I knocked on his door. Donald Trump, he told me, was “better than what we had before”.

The world is consumed by Trump’s chaos. In MAGA heartland, they’ve barely noticed

Polls show the president has lost his sheen. But from “Hog’s Haven” to a hair salon in rural Kentucky, Americans who voted for Donald Trump still think he’s their best chance.

BY Michael Koziol

After nearly 100 days of Trump’s second term, that remains a dominant sentiment among the president’s supporters. While the chaos of tariffs, government cuts, court showdowns and the Russia-Ukraine war dominate global headlines, for most Americans, life goes on largely unchanged.

They might have half an eye on Washington occasionally, but they are paying more attention to their grocery bills, which have only gone up since January, despite Trump’s claims to the contrary. They are cynical about politics but optimistic, in that classically American way, that the future is bright.

In Magnolia, a tiny town an hour’s drive from Louisville, Kentucky, local hairdresser Amber Wheeler has no regrets about voting for Trump.

“I think that it can only get better. I mean, I guess it could get worse, but hopefully not,” she says. “It was pretty bad, especially as a business owner. Everything, even products and stuff like that, have tripled in price. It’s been crazy.”

Wheeler says her salon is doing well. “But I have to give God all the glory for that, not Trump. Or anybody in office. It’s all God. I really try not to get reliant on the government, or anybody else because, at the end of the day, they’re not my provider. God’s never failed me.”

It is the first time in my career an interview has ended with the subject saying a prayer for me and Luke, our photographer, before we leave.

Trump may not be God but in his first 100 days, he has tried to grant himself divine powers. His flurry of executive orders – ceremonial or guiding though many of them are – announced his determination to move quickly and decisively. He declared emergencies and used them to impose tariffs on Mexico, Canada and the world, bypassing Congress. He deployed an old wartime law to deport suspected illegal migrants without due process, instigating a judicial showdown and accusations he has ignored court orders. He handed unelected billionaire Elon Musk the keys to the bureaucracy with instructions to cut costs and end waste.

Though he has only just made his first overseas trip – to Rome for Pope Francis’ funeral – Trump has made an enormous mark on world politics. His embrace of Russia’s Vladimir Putin and readiness to walk away from Ukraine surpassed expectations, raising the question of what Washington stands for in the age of Trump. His proposal to take over and redevelop the Gaza Strip as a real estate play shocked the Middle East. His tariffs on friend and foe alike upended world financial markets and sparked a trade war with the US’s great rival, China.

A lot has happened in a short time. But how much of it is meaningful?

Tariffs provide the best example of Trump’s proclivity to oscillate. His initial worldwide program of so-called reciprocal levies, announced with great fanfare on “Liberation Day”, quickly morphed into a targeted move against China, with everyone else copping a reduced rate of 10 per cent, at least for 90 days.

Last week, Trump acknowledged the obvious: a 145 per cent tariff on Chinese products, and vice versa, was unsustainable, and the rates would have to come down substantially, whether Beijing “made a deal” or not.

In the middle of his see-saw are people like Caleb Ragland, a ninth-generation farmer from Magnolia, Kentucky and the president of the American Soybean Association. His ancestors settled there at the same time as former president Abraham Lincoln’s parents moved to a farm just down the road, where Lincoln was born in 1809.

Soybeans are fed to livestock, and are the US’s most valuable export to China. Last year, 27 million tonnes were shipped there, worth about $US12.8 billion ($20.1 billion). But as a proportion, soybean exports to China never fully recovered from the 2018 trade war declared by the last Trump administration, with China now relying more heavily on Brazil, and to a lesser extent, Argentina, Uruguay and Canada.

“In 2017, we were sending about 33 per cent of all soybean production in the US to China,” Ragland says. “If you saw a field, every third row of soybeans was going to China. Now it’s about one in four. We don’t need another step down like that again.”

But that’s exactly what’s happening. Ragland will plant his soybean crop next month, ahead of the expected October harvest, but at this stage, he doesn’t know whether the Chinese will buy it. Current tariffs effectively amount to a trade embargo.

Ragland wrote an opinion piece about the financial difficulties of farming and pleaded with Trump to make a deal with China. He voted for Trump three times, and says he still has confidence the businessman will come through with the goods.

“For the most part, he’s pretty well doing what he said he was going to do,” Ragland tells me. “He’s made a lot of waves. As a father, as an American citizen, a lot of the stuff he’s doing and working on is hard, and there’s a lot of pushback. But whatever it is, $36-37 trillion of debt and so forth, I don’t know if that’s sustainable for my kids, my grandkids potentially one day. I hope that a lot of this stuff gets figured out.”

An hour away in Louisville, Victor Yarbrough also hangs on every tariff development. Over the past decade, his Brough Brothers Distillery has morphed from an import/export business to Kentucky’s first African American-owned distillery, producing about 30,000 cases a year. He is about to move to a larger facility nearby, and was planning to start selling products to Canada, the biggest market for Kentucky bourbon.

“They were supposed to come in next month,” Yarbrough says of the Canadian buyers. But in response to Trump’s tariffs, Canada’s provinces have removed American liquor from the shelves of their government-run wholesalers, and banned new contracts with US companies. It’s awkward for both sides.

“They understand it’s not us per se, but at the same time, I understand why they’re upset,” Yarbrough says. “It could be a while before we get the Canadian relations back on par.”

Brough Brothers is pivoting to a European strategy, hoping to use their new production capacity to sell bourbon to Britain, France and Germany.

But that too may depend on a lasting tariff truce with the European Union, a bloc Trump describes as “one of the most hostile and abusive taxing and tariffing authorities in the world, which was formed for the sole purpose of taking advantage of the United States”.

Yarbrough is calm and matter-of-fact about the dilemma. “We’re taking it one day at a time,” he says. “It’s not necessarily [that we’re] angry, mad, sad, happy, glad. It’s just more about: this is what’s occurred, how do we respond, how do we continue to pivot? The uncertainty, for the most part, is what worries us as a business.”

Meanwhile, on the radio in Louisville, I hear regular ads from a jeweller encouraging listeners to buy now to avoid tariff-related price hikes of up to 50 per cent. “We saw this coming, and we prepared,” the voiceover says. “We’re not raising prices on our existing inventory.”

On Thursday, a widely discussed Fox News poll showed Trump’s popularity is faltering. The poll, conducted between April 18 and 21, gave him an overall approval rating of 44 per cent, down from 49 per cent in March, with 55 per cent disapproving.

That’s significantly lower than Joe Biden’s approval rating 100 days into his term (54 per cent), and far below Barack Obama (62 per cent) and George W. Bush (63 per cent) in their first terms. But it’s about the same as Trump’s approval rating was 100 days into his first term in office.

Like others before it, the poll found voters marked Trump down on economic matters more than anything else. His approval rating on the economy was 38 per cent, while on tariffs and inflation it dropped to 33 per cent. But 55 per cent approved of his handling of border security, and 47 per cent on immigration.

Despite the survey coming from the right-wing, News Corp-owned Fox News, Trump dismissed it as unreliable. “Rupert Murdoch has told me for years that he is going to get rid of his Fox News, Trump Hating, Fake Pollster, but he has never done so,” Trump raged on Truth Social. “This ‘pollster’ has gotten me, and MAGA, wrong for years. While he’s at it, he should start making changes at the China Loving Wall Street Journal. It sucks!!!”

But the Fox poll was not an outlier. It broadly matched the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll (approval 42 per cent, disapproval 53 per cent) and Economist/YouGov poll (approval 44 per cent, disapproval 53 per cent).

RealClearPolitics, which tracks polling averages, has Trump’s approval at a net negative of 5.5 and falling.

People are also less confident about their economic future. In January, YouGov polling showed 38 per cent felt their household would be better off in a year’s time, while 20 per cent thought they would be worse off. Three months later, only 31 per cent believe things will be better in a year, and 34 per cent say things will be worse. Meanwhile, the proportion who believes the country is “on the wrong track” has also started to tick up again.

Trump won in large part because of Americans’ grievances about post-COVID inflation and border security, as well as malaise about the country’s direction and perceived lack of strength under Joe Biden. It is difficult to overstate how much Biden’s decline – and what seems to many like a cover-up – weighed on voters’ minds in November and still frames how they view Trump 2.0.

“Who we had before, he couldn’t even talk,” says Whitney Barnes, 29, the client getting her hair coloured at Amber Wheeler’s salon in Kentucky, a safe red state. “He was blubbering over everything he was saying.”

“It was heartbreaking,” Wheeler, 34, adds. “It was almost like America was a laughing stock. You couldn’t take anything [he said] seriously. For one, you couldn’t understand it.”

Both women are pleased a businessman is in the White House. Then Barnes says something that helps clarify why some Americans are prepared to trust Trump: he has convinced them their financial woes are not due to structural defects in the American economy but a result of unfair treatment by other countries and outsiders.

“With the tariffs, I’m sure it’s making a lot of other countries unhappy. But I feel like he’s really just trying to make it an even playing field,” she says. “Because we get taxed on everything here. Not only do we get taxed before we spend our money, but we get taxed when we spend our money. So I feel like it’s just making it fair.”

Wendy Edelberg, a macroeconomist and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank, is not fussed by Trump’s dip in the polls, nor even the rapid decline in US consumer confidence. Instead, she has her eye on how Trump’s oscillation and chaos is creating uncertainty for businesses.

“It’s just impossible to plan right now,” Edelberg says. “If you look at the surveys done by the Federal Reserve, you have record percentages of firms saying they do not plan to increase business investment over the next six months. Similarly, you see record declines in the number of businesses that say they are going to increase their spending plans.”

Like a growing number of economists and analysts, Edelberg is worried about a US recession. But she notes the labour market remains strong (unemployment is at 4.2 per cent) and that Trump’s revised tariffs will probably have a more muted effect on inflation than originally thought.

“I don’t see the economic shock coming from the consumer. If we continue along the path that we’re on, I think the economy turning south will be because of businesses, who are laser focused on uncertainty. The uncertainty is the thing that potentially triggers a recession.”

Edelberg acknowledges a gulf between what ordinary Americans might perceive of Trump’s tactics and the way experts, chief executives and market watchers have reacted.

“In some ways, he’s doing exactly what he was elected to do, which is: shake things up, don’t do things the way they were done before, knock heads together, stir the pot, create some chaos,” she says.

“People like me look at this and say, ‘Oh my god, the world’s on fire’. I think people more broadly are looking at what’s happening inside the beltway and saying, ‘Good, maybe this will finally get things on a better track’.”

[Trump’s vulnerability on tariffs and inflation was underlined on Tuesday when he reacted aggressively to reports Amazon was going to show customers how much the tariffs were pushing up the cost of each item on its online store. He reportedly called the company’s founder Jeff Bezos, while White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called it a “hostile and political act”. Amazon later said it never planned to display the tariff charge on its main website.]

Trump’s barnstorming first 100 days created such a whirlwind of noise and change that it was difficult for his Democratic opponents to keep up, let alone focus. They have also been divided over strategy, most notably in deciding whether to support a Republican spending bill or allow the federal government to shut down.

But Democrats and activists are picking themselves up off the floor and mobilising. Hundreds of thousands, if not millions, participated in “Hands Off” rallies across the country in early April, marching against not only Trump but Elon Musk, who has proved a lightning rod for public anger and fear. Demonstrations outside Tesla dealerships remain commonplace, people are vandalising cars and Musk’s company this week reported a 71 per cent drop in profits for the first three months of the year.

(At a cocktail bar in downtown Louisville, in deep red Kentucky, a woman who voted for Trump and believed September 11 was an inside job told me she thought Musk was evil. “I don’t trust Elon Musk. I just don’t,” she said. “I do love Trump. I don’t blindly love him, though.” She did not want to be identified.)

Trump’s opponents may find they lose a powerful piece of ammunition if Musk departs the White House next month as he says he will. The end comes not, as many imagined, from a dramatic falling out with Trump but a need to get back to his day job and stem the bleeding. And while Trump publicly lauds Musk as a genius and a star, the billionaire’s time at the apex of power has not been smooth. He fell foul of Secretary of State Marco Rubio early on in his cost-cutting rampage, had an ugly public spat with Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro, and was reportedly involved in a shouting match with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent at the White House.

Internally, Trump has run a smoother operation than his first term. There have been no high-profile sackings; according to various US news reports, Trump is determined not to give the media a “scalp”, a preference which plays to the advantage of his embattled defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host.

Still, one of the hallmarks of Trump’s capricious nature is that people fall in and out of favour, and whatever decision carries the day may be a function of whom he saw last. According to a recent story in The Wall Street Journal, Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick convinced Trump to back down on tariffs last week after “rushing to the Oval Office” while Navarro was in a meeting in a different part of the building. Having convinced him, they stayed and crafted a Truth Social post to announce the news, sending markets soaring.

Democrats have a buffet of potential weak points to choose from. Do they underline the chaos and confusion of policies that change by the day, and the accompanying market turmoil? Do they stoke fears about public service cuts and changes to Medicare, Medicaid and social security? Should they focus on the hip pocket? What would they do differently? And how far should they go to defend due process and the rule of law, even if it means being seen to side with an undocumented migrant and alleged gang member in Kilmar Abrego Garcia over ordinary Americans? (He and his family deny the allegations.)

Maxwell Frost, a Democratic congressman from Florida and the first Generation Z member of Congress, said it was incumbent on Democrats to walk and chew gum at the same time. He went to El Salvador, where Abrego Garcia is incarcerated, as part of a Democratic contingent calling for the man’s release and return to the US.

“We have to be able to talk about … multiple issues at the same time,” Frost said afterwards. “This is more than just about immigration, it’s about the rule of law and due process impacting a lot of my constituents.

“I can fight both Donald Trump’s disregard for the rule of law and due process, and also fight the fact that his reckless tariffs have really hurt the economy … Unfortunately, there are a lot of things to fight right now.”

Their messages are beginning to materialise. Vermont senator Bernie Sanders and New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, respectively 83 and 35 years old, are railing against corruption and big money on a speaking tour called “Fighting Oligarchy”. California governor Gavin Newsom, widely seen as a potential 2028 presidential candidate, is reaching out to conservatives on his new podcast.

Congressman Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, gave a speech in Cleveland last week in which he outlined a broad economic vision based on boosting wages, protecting national security and reviving industrial towns.

“What we need in this country is a new economic patriotism, not a second gilded age,” he said. “Economic patriotism does not mean isolationism. If we want people to buy our stuff, they need to like us. Usually people don’t buy your stuff if they don’t like you.”

As for Trump, he will mark his 100 days in office by holding a rally in Michigan, a crucial swing state he won by 1.4 per cent. It will be a rare domestic trip for the president, who has spent most of these first months either at the White House or at his weekend home in Florida.

https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-america/the-world-is-consumed-by-trump-s-chaos-in-maga-heartland-they-ve-barely-noticed-20250422-p5ltas.html

SEE ALSO: https://x.com/geraldcelente/status/1884066527122477546

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