Opinion | Trump Is Unpopular. Does He Know It?

I’m not — I’m not going to make any predictions. But I will say it feels as if right now is the most popular he’s going to be. Well, I have a basic question going backwards. Do we think he knows what the situation is like? Who’s going to tell him? I mean, is JD Vance, who basically is sucking up as hard as he can at any given moment, Is he going to march in there and say: Sir, we have a problem. I mean, who’s in that position? I mean, is he even aware? That’s a great question. And I would say no. He’s — so much about being president — I wrote about this last year, before the election, and it was just like one of my frustrations about election coverage, which is that we talk about the presidency in terms of policy. But like in a real sense the president can’t do that much policy-wise, directly. The president should have a legislative agenda, should have some sense of what they want to do with the executive agencies. But the job of the presidency isn’t a policy job. It’s a management job. And all management jobs, all management jobs are fundamentally information jobs. They’re about cultivating information. They’re about filtering information. They’re about processing information. And they’re about getting the best information you can to make decisions. And the presidency in particular is bombarded with information. But also, good presidents are aware that the best kinds of information they can get is often political information, how the dynamics of the agencies are looking, how the dynamics in Congress are working, how everything looks from a political standpoint. And Trump has created this bubble for himself where none of that information gets in.