A lot of powerful people just don’t realize how unpopular Trump is

The backlash to ABC/Disney canceling Kimmel shows why it's important for businesses and the public to understand that two-thirds of Americans are not Trump voters

Last week, ABC/Disney canceled Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show after the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, threatened to revoke the broadcast licenses of television stations that carry the program. The backlash has been swift: As I pointed out Saturday morning, search interest for “Cancel Disney+” has hit an all-time high — even higher than the boycott movements from when Disney “went woke” in 2020-2022. The current Disney boycott is now 4x as large as any over the last 5 years, gauged by search interest:

This is not limited to internet posters and Google searchers; investors are worried too. Disney’s stock is down 2% over the last week, while the overall market is up nearly 1%.

This all intersects with a point I’ve been making in this newsletter for a while: many people fundamentally underestimate how unpopular Trump is. As the Disney episode illustrates, they do this at their own peril.

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Trump is unpopular

Compare Trump’s topline job approval (-11) to that of other recent presidents, and he stands out quite clearly (not in a good way):

The president’s entire domestic policy agenda is underwater, too — especially on the economy and inflation, the two issues that won him the 2024 election:

But the problem for Trump (and those who ignore the data) runs deeper than the topline indicates. It’s not just that more people disapprove than approve of Trump, but that the disapprovers feel their emotions much, much more intensely. Depending on the polls you pick for your average, between 46 and 50 percent of U.S. adults tell pollsters they “strongly disapprove” of the job Trump is doing as president. That is double the percent that strongly approve (24%):

Put another way, less than half of the people who voted for Trump in 2024 currently “strongly approve” of his presidency.

A lot of non-voters hate Trump

Yet, consumer-facing companies keep siding with Trump. Why? Regulatory pressure is one explanation: Maybe Disney/ABC really are worried about Brendan Carr taking local station licenses, more than they're worried about audiences and attention. And other companies have behaved similarly: Paramount did what it apparently needed to do to get a merger with Skydance through Carr’s FCC, too. And Target very publicly rolled back lots of corporate DEI policies this spring.

But a broadcast license doesn’t really help you if you have nobody to broadcast to. By siding with Trump, ABC alienated a large portion of its audience. This is similar to what happened to Target: it marginalized its consumer base and saw a precipitous decline in sales in Q2 this year.

The actions of each company are perplexing. Of particular note is that these firms are worth billions of dollars, with some of the most expensive lawyers in the world. Experts say ABC could have won its suit against the FCC — and, for that matter, the case against George Stephanopoulos that it settled for $15M last year. Paramount-Skydance settled an even more frivolous case against CBS News/60 Minutes when it didn’t need to, especially when it offered up Stephen Colbert as a sacrifice to Trump and Carr anyway.

From what I can tell, executives at these companies are making a simple statistical mistake that is imperiling their decision-making: They are assuming that all U.S. adults, in 2025, look like U.S. voters in 2024. Let’s do some quick math:

• 53%: Trump’s topline disapproval in our polling average today

• 48%: The percent of U.S. adults who “strongly disapprove” of Trump’s job as president.

• 49.8%: The share of the vote Trump won among voters in 2024

Now, you could say that since 49.8% is bigger than 48% — or, similarly, that Kamala Harris only won 48.3% of the vote in 2024 — then to keep the public on your side, you need to do whatever the 49.8% wants. But this ignores a crucial fourth statistic:

• 64.1%: The share of voting-eligible adults who turned out to vote in 2024

That’s right, not all adults voted in 2024. To calculate the share of adults who voted for Trump, you need to multiply the percentage of adults who voted by the percentage of people who voted for Trump:

• 64.1 * 0.498 = 31.9%

That gives us 32%. So:

• Under a third of American adults are Trump voters

• 53% of adults are Trump disapprovers — with 48% intensely opposed

It’s not hard to see how making decisions for the former, pissing off the latter, would be bad for business. Elections reward coalitions of voters, while markets respond to consumers — voters and non-voters — whose preferences show up not just on Election Day, but in audience ratings, subscription revenue, purchases (like trips to Disney World), etc. If a president is unpopular with the broader public (and not just the out-party), you should expect friction for brands, platforms, and legacy media that appear to bend toward him.

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Old media does not understand its audience

My opinion is that the failure of “old media” in Trump’s second term is endemic to both the business models of mainstream broadcast TV corporations and the philosophies of the executives steering the ship, especially on the news side.

See, Disney/Paramount are not losing revenue for news because all consumers are abandoning all news. Quite the opposite: Interest in alternatives to the broadcast networks is soaring. Semafor reports a bump in subscribers for left-wing and anti-Trump newsletters, such as The Bulwark and Crooked Media, since Trump took office. Semafor’s reporting even underplays their success: These two newsletters alone combine for an audience that is larger than that of any late-night show (Kimmel was reportedly reaching just 1 million people nightly, and only ~250,000 in the younger demographics that advertisers care about.

Then consider the size of the email list for other liberal Substackers (Substack GOAT Heather Cox Richardson has 2 million readers, Paul Krugman is approaching half a million), it won’t be long until #Resistance Substacks command a larger audience than all of TV news combined.

Instead, my experience in this world has given me the opinion that many network executive simply misunderstand their audience and their product. When I was at ABC News, people viewed news (broadcast and streaming) as a product for everyone, watched by everyone, and trusted for its factual content and perception as a non-partisan source. There was an implicit view (bizarre to me, given trends in streaming news viewership — also terrible) that everybody wanted to watch news, cable was just dying; if you just got the facts in front of people, they would tune in.

My view (probably too outspoken, in hindsight) was that this business model died at least a decade ago, when figures like Rush Limbaugh and Donald Trump polarized facts for partisan gain. Since 2016, the president has made watching factual news coverage into a signal of membership in the Democratic tribe; ABC is “fake news,” CBS has “terrible ratings,” NBC is communist or whatever. The result is that somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of people who frequently watch “old media” are Democrats (according to Pew).

The impact of this is that criticism of the president, on non-partisan grounds, is now coded as a partisan action. If David Muir says that the president is doing something that experts say is unconstitutional, this comes off as Democratic-leaning speech solely because the company brand has become more Democratic-leaning. And this means that, so long as news remains committed to the values that Edward Murrow and Walter Cronkite embodied, it is simply not possible for a company covering Trump to remain — as viewed by the political right — effectively non-partisan. This set up a standoff between the journalists, and the values of a news operation, and the PR executives of a mega-corporation. You can guess who won.

My anecdotal experience suggests executives decided (explicitly or otherwise) to preserve their news hegemony by constantly attempting to minimize backlash among Republicans, often by marginalizing Democrats. Many times in my tenure at ABC, I was told we couldn’t work with certain data vendors or had to change language in our stories to avoid giving Republicans something they could use to criticize the company. (Many of us were unhappy and tried to quit over this, but it’s not like we had other places to go.) Higher-ups blacklisted data suppliers with histories of working for Democrats, after signing off on projects using those suppliers, and they stripped our copy of nuance and empirical caveats that “could be taken out of context” (at the suggestion of the PR team and Disney’s lawyers).

In my opinion, the big problem at network news boils down to this: Executives don’t actually see news as journalism.

As a former insider in this environment, the firing of Kimmel looks like a product of the very same mentality. Jimmy was the sacrificial lamb the network serves up to Republicans as a way to appear non-partisan. It’s as if they believe one high-profile firing can earn back the goodwill the company has lost with MAGA Republicans over a decade of post-truth politics.

Hopefully, in hindsight, executives can see that the utility of this strategy is roughly zero in most cases, and in others can be sharply negative. Network news is not winning back conservatives. Trying to appease them by kowtowing to Trump will only drive away the audience — disproportionately highly educated, highly engaged Democrats — that remains.

In the age of newsletters, YouTube, podcasts, and vertical video, consumers have plenty of other good options.

The bottom line

Here’s the bottom line, which I guess I am destined to repeat until I am blue in the face: Trump won a close national vote in 2024, but he remains broadly unpopular today. The share of the adult population that voted for Trump is closer to one-third than to “most,” and the intensity of resistance against him is 2x the intensity of his supporters.

Businesses that don’t understand this are destined to make key strategic and tactical errors — as are parties and politicians.