America First? Some Trump Supporters Worry That's No Longer the Case. [View all]

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https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/14/us/politics/trump-supporters-america-first-concerns.html

https://archive.ph/Bjisp

America First? Some Trump Supporters Worry That’s No Longer the Case.
President Trump has been dining with billionaires and has taken a keen interest in crises overseas, leading to fears that he is drifting away from his more populist stances.
By Zolan Kanno-Youngs and Tyler Pager
Nov. 14, 2025

President Trump has been dining with Wall Street bigwigs. He has embarked on an opulent revamp of the White House at a time when Americans are struggling to pay their bills. He has expressed support for granting visas to skilled foreigners to take jobs in the United States. He approved a $20 billion bailout for Argentina, helping a foreign government and wealthy investors at a moment when the U.S. government was shut down.

For a president who returned to office promising to avoid foreign entanglements, make life more affordable and ensure that available jobs go to American citizens, it has been a significant departure from the expectations of his loyal base. And it is starting to open a rift with his supporters who were counting on a more aggressively populist agenda.

The divisions within Mr. Trump’s movement, spawned by his own actions, have been only amplified by the latest developments on a story that he has been doing his best to quash: his relationship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Much of the president’s MAGA movement, and many of his top aides, pushed for years for all the investigative files on the Epstein case to be made public, insisting that a rich and well-connected man — and his network of wealthy and powerful friends — needed to be held accountable for any abuse of young women.

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