Why is the historically unpopular president so popular?

Deputy NYT opinion editor Patrick Healy got the opinion section conservative columnists together to discuss why Donald Trump is so popular, based on cherry picking one source of data (right track/wrong track numbers) from an NBC poll and downplaying or ignoring others. The questions are like this:

Healy: I want to bear down on the idea that more Americans think the country is on the right track with Trump. I have three theories to stress-test with you — or else I want to hear your own.

One: Authoritarians are popular, until they aren’t — that’s how it works.

Two: The enthusiasm is a honeymoon stemming from the November election, where Democrats got a big comeuppance from Trump.

Three: A lot of Americans think Trump is generally right in both his diagnosis and Rx of government — that nothing terribly bad is going to happen, that the State Department can run foreign aid and the Treasury and the states can run Education Department programs, that tariffs will be a net positive in the long run, and that for all the sound and fury (and illegality), Trump 2.0 is trying to help America avoid becoming like societies struggling with long-term decline, weak national identities and sclerotic economies.

Let’s step back here for a second. Trump won a narrow popular vote win in a context in which incumbent parties throughout the western world have been losing by much larger margins, with no legislative coattails. And the only president less popular with the public at this point in his presidency was…Donald Trump 1.0:

Much less popular than Biden at the same point in his presidency after being elected by a narrower margin. And yet everyone bends the knee. https://t.co/hEFWuYuRZv— Brendan Nyhan (@BrendanNyhan on ) (@BrendanNyhan) March 21, 2025

And this is while he’s still benefiting from Biden’s economy, to which he is determined to bring higher prices and slower growth. As a couple of the columnists do explain to Healy, there’s nothing more interesting going on than “Republicans like the Republican president during his honeymoon.” Biden won by a much larger margin and was more popular at this point in his presidency, and it’s impossible to imagine Healy doing this in March 2021.

What is pretty obvious is that the elaborate third theory in the question above represents Healy’s view — he thinks that the country is on the right track with the strongman who will deliver him a tax cut and own the annoying libs back in charge. At this point, it’s useful go back to Paul Krugman’s explanation for why he left the Times:

In September 2024 my newsletter was suddenly suspended by the Times. The only reason I was given was “a problem of cadence”: according to the Times, I was writing too often. I don’t know why this was considered a problem, since my newsletter was never intended to be published as part of the regular paper. Moreover, it had proved to be popular with a number of readers.

Also in 2024, the editing of my regular columns went from light touch to extremely intrusive. I went from one level of editing to three, with an immediate editor and his superior both weighing in on the column, and sometimes doing substantial rewrites before it went to copy. These rewrites almost invariably involved toning down, introducing unnecessary qualifiers, and, as I saw it, false equivalence. I would rewrite the rewrites to restore the essence of my original argument. But as I told Charles Kaiser, I began to feel that I was putting more effort—especially emotional energy—into fixing editorial damage than I was into writing the original articles. And the end result of the back and forth often felt flat and colorless.

One more thing: I faced attempts from others to dictate what I could (and could not) write about, usually in the form, “You’ve already written about that,” as if it never takes more than one column to effectively cover a subject. If that had been the rule during my earlier tenure, I never would have been able to press the case for Obamacare, or against Social Security privatization, and—most alarmingly—against the Iraq invasion. Moreover, all Times opinion writers were banned from engaging in any kind of media criticism. Hardly the kind of rule that would allow an opinion writer to state, “we are being lied into war.”

Leaving aside EMAILS, Judy Miller, Harvard plagiarism, trans youth medication, etc. etc. aside, I’m guessing “you’ve already written about that” was a standard never applied to. say, the Times’s full-time presidential age correspondent.