No, The People Didn’t Vote For This
A stunning 54% of Americans now believe we’re in a Constitutional crisis, according to recent YouGov polling. They’re right. As a tech billionaire effectively dismantles federal agencies without Congressional authority — agencies that Congress explicitly created and funded — we’re watching in real-time as our system of checks and balances crumbles.
Yet supporters of the current administration keep insisting “this is exactly what the people voted for.” That’s clearly bullshit. While I’m sure that some cultists have no problem watching the US Constitution burn, and many will gleefully embrace all of this because it “makes the libs sad,” that’s wholly different from whether Trump has a mandate to destroy the constitutional order. The reality is far more complex, and far more concerning for anyone who cares about constitutional governance.
Yes, Donald Trump won the election, though he did so with a very small margin — just 1.2% of the popular vote — and less than 50% of the total vote. So there’s hardly a huge mandate here.
But, more to the point, he was elected based on promises that he wouldn’t actually do what he’s doing now. Trump swore up and down that he did not support Project 2025’s plan to gut the government. The entire premise of Project 2025 fundamentally misunderstands (or deliberately misrepresents) the constitutional framework of administrative agencies. These aren’t just bureaucratic inconveniences to be eliminated at will — they’re congressionally authorized entities carrying out specific statutory mandates.
Trump seemed to understand this political liability during the campaign, explicitly distancing himself from Project 2025’s plan to gut these agencies. And because the mainstream press has been beaten into submission by false claims of “anti-conservative bias,” they simply repeated these denials without examining either the reality of them or the implications if Trump was lying.
That’s why USA Today ran a fact check claiming Trump didn’t support Project 2025. Politico ran a report citing “anonymous sources” saying that Trump’s team had put together a blocklist of anyone associated with Project 2025, declaring that they would not be allowed in his administration.
Former President Donald Trump’s transition operation is compiling lists of names of people to keep out of a second Trump administration.
The lists of undesirable staffers include people linked to the Project 2025 policy blueprint
Of course, since gaining office they have ignored that entirely, basically enacting much of Project 2025 and including many Project 2025 authors in key positions, including one of its main architects, Russ Vought, to lead the Office of Management and Budget.
This appointment wasn’t just another broken promise — it was Trump explicitly installing the very architect of a plan he had repeatedly said he rejected, making his previous denials impossible to defend as anything but calculated deception.
It is hardly a “mandate” to do something if you spent most of the election denying you’d do that very thing.
Yes, the Musk/Trump cultists were gleeful after the election, saying that of course Project 2025 was the real plan all along. Political observers across the spectrum knew Trump’s distancing was a lie, but there’s a reason he felt compelled to make that lie: the actual agenda would have repelled the moderate and independent voters who provided his narrow margin of victory. Whatever “mandate” he claims was built on promises he never intended to keep.
For some supporters, this isn’t about policy at all — it’s a performative middle finger to “elites” they blame for stagnant wages and cultural shifts. Their support stems not from policy alignment but from tribal resentment, making them willing to burn constitutional guardrails if it “owns the libs.” But that’s a much smaller group than the cultists believe.
The polling data shows just how badly this bait-and-switch is playing with the public. Outside the narrow band of cultists whose only principle is “owning the libs,” Americans are increasingly alarmed by the Musk/Trump administration’s actions.
Democrats, obviously, aren’t thrilled, but the more meaningful data is that Republicans don’t like what Elon Musk is doing at all.
The share of Republicans who say they want tech billionaire Elon Musk to have significant influence in the Trump administration has fallen substantially in the months since President Trump was elected.
In The Economist/YouGov poll taken in the days after the November 2024 election, 47 percent of surveyed Republicans said they wanted Musk to have “a lot” of influence in the Trump administration, while 29 percent wanted “a little” and 12 percent wanted him to have “none at all.”
Today, however, the share of Republicans who say they want Musk to have “a lot” of influence has fallen substantially to 26 percent. Meanwhile, 43 percent of Republican respondents say they want Musk to have “a little” influence, and 17 percent say they want him to have “none at all,” according to the latest poll from The Economist/YouGov released Wednesday.
That’s likely to only get worse as the real economic impacts of Musk’s “streamlining” become clear. Voters who supported Trump based on economic promises are instead seeing federal support for their local hospitals vanish, government contracts that supported thousands of local jobs disappear, and consumer prices continue to rise. The very voters who wanted economic stability are getting the opposite: economic chaos driven by an unelected billionaire’s personal agenda.
That’s only among Republicans, who had been excited to have Musk involved in the government. But as his unilateral dismantling of federal agencies accelerates, even his former supporters are realizing this goes far beyond “running government like a business” — it’s about destroying the basic functions of government itself.
This growing awareness is reflected in a shocking YouGov poll that found 54% of Americans think we’re in a constitutional crisis, with only 27% confident we’re not. When more than half the country believes we’re in a constitutional crisis, and barely a quarter is sure we aren’t, we’ve moved well beyond normal political disagreements about the size and scope of government.
I know the cultists will argue that the public supports them, but they’re increasingly trapped in a shrinking snowglobe of propaganda, desperately denying the reality that more and more Americans are seeing this mess for what it is.
"The United States is in a constitutional crisis"Agree: 54%Disagree: 27%Unsure: 19%YouGov / Feb 6, 2025 / n=1106
— Polling USA (@usapolling.bsky.social) 2025-02-08T22:55:00.554Z
Those are fairly stunning numbers, given that when I called some of Musk’s actions a form of a Constitutional crisis just last week, some people mocked me as being hysterical. But it appears that a large part of the public is waking up to the fact that Musk isn’t driving towards “efficiency in government,” he’s looking to destroy the government.
The YouGov numbers reveal a stark reality: the American public is increasingly aware that something fundamental has gone wrong. While some extremists might celebrate this constitutional breakdown, the majority of voters — including many Trump supporters — are realizing this isn’t what they signed up for.
The campaign promised economic relief: cheaper eggs and lower gas prices. Instead, voters got an unelected tech billionaire systematically dismantling federal agencies, surrounded by a coterie of 4chan edgelord trolls LARPing as cabinet secretaries, all operating without congressional oversight or constitutional authority. They voted for economic stability and got the effective end of the American Constitutional Republic instead.