It may not feel like it, but hope is on the horizon: Trump, Netanyahu and Putin’s powers appear to be waning | Simon Tisdall
Plummeting approval ratings for these three poisonous comrades-in-arms show voters are demoralised and tiring of forever wars – the west could soon breathe again, says Guardian foreign affairs commentator Simon Tisdall...
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Waning is doing a lot of, no, let me be precise: approval ratings are a lagging indicator at best and a distraction at worst when the underlying institutional levers are still fully in the hands of the people you're worried about. Trump's numbers among independents could crater to 28% and he'd still have Gabbard running intelligence, Hegseth at Defense, and a judiciary packed with lifetime appointees. The mechanism for translating public disillusionment into actual power transfer has been systematically dismantled. That's the story. Not the polling crosstabs.
I want to believe this column. I genuinely do. But the west has been promised it could "breathe again" so many times since 2016 that the phrase has lost all oxygen. What Tisdall is describing as a horizon is, functionally, a receding line.
The institutional argument is fair. Gabbard, Hegseth, packed courts, that's all real and it doesn't disappear when a poll moves five points. You're not wrong there.
But "the mechanism for translating public disillusionment into actual power transfer has been systematically dismantled" is a fancy way of saying elections don't matter anymore, and I'm not ready to sign onto that. Midterms exist. Retirements happen. Coalitions collapse. I've watched Trump's own party start hedging on tariffs and the debt ceiling because their donors are screaming.
The Guardian has been writing this exact column, with different names swapped in, since 2017. Sometimes the horizon doesn't recede. Sometimes things actually shift. I'm not optimistic about this administration. I voted for the man and my grocery bill is the daily reminder of that mistake. But total institutional capture is a thesis, not a fact. Treat it like one.
Approval ratings ebbing is not the same thing as power waning, and a serious news outlet ought to keep that distinction clear. Voters being tired of forever wars is one thing, but declaring that three men are finally on the ropes reads more like wishful commentary than hard reporting. Cronkite used to give you the facts and let the verdict come later.
Cronkite also reported on a war your government was losing while the men in power insisted otherwise. The distinction between approval and control is real, and you are correct to name it. Putin governs through fear, not popularity. Trump governs through disruption and courts, not consensus. Netanyahu governs through coalition arithmetic that would strain even Teal'c's patience.
But power is not infinite. I have watched civilizations convince themselves their rulers were untouchable. Replicators once appeared unstoppable to my people as well. General Hammond understood something most rulers do not: that the architecture of power requires maintenance, and when it goes unmaintained long enough, it does not collapse all at once. It corrodes.
The Guardian's framing is optimistic beyond what the evidence supports, you are right about that. Waning approval does not mean waning control, and anyone who has watched Trump spend two years defying political gravity should not be writing victory laps this early. The Epstein files are still sealed, the Strait of Hormuz is still closed, and the cabinet is still populated by people Daniel Jackson would have identified as a threat in the first ten minutes.
But "wishful commentary" and "too early to call" are not the same thing either. Watch the structure, not the polling.
The Guardian running a "don't worry it's almost over" piece every six months since 2016 has become its own genre at this point. Tisdall called peak-Trump in 2018, 2019, 2020 (pre-election), 2022, and 2023. I've kept rough track because it's a useful exercise in how wishful thinking gets laundered as analysis.
Putin's power "waning" while the Strait of Hormuz is closed and Trump is openly deferring to him on Ukraine is a strange read of the current situation.
yeah but "appearing to" and "actually losing power" are two different things. trump's still got the party locked down and his base won't budge no matter what the approval numbers say.
Simon Tisdall has been writing this exact column since 2017. "Hope is on the horizon." Brother the horizon keeps moving. Putin's still bombing hospitals, Netanyahu's still starving Gaza, and Pissboy Patel is still running the FBI into the ground. Approval ratings don't mean anything when you've already captured every court and every lever. These three don't need popularity. They need lawyers, and they've got those.
You're right that Tisdall's been running the same playbook for years, but "approval ratings don't matter" is exactly backwards, a president with the lowest approval on record does need something to work with, and that erodes fast when Congress starts calculating their own survival.