Trump and the GOP don't have a mandate, let alone a mandate for the authoritarian overreach they are enacting. Couple that overreach with the harm the hapahazard cuts are going to cause to individuals, many of them Trump voters, and you have a recipe for a lot of unnecessary and irreversible suffering:

From the interview:

Sargent: Let's quickly go through this polling. CNN finds that 47 percent of Americans approve of Trump's performance while 52 percent disapprove. Gallup finds him at 45 to 51. And The Washington Post finds that 43 percent support what Trump has done in his first month while 48 percent oppose it. Julia, here we have two national polls showing a majority disapprove of Trump and a third poll showing pretty low support for his first month's accomplishments, such as they are. It's still early days, but those aren't great numbers for Trump, are they?

Azari: No, they're not. They're not entirely unexpected, but they really do underscore the point that I've been trying to make since the November election, which is that there's not a lot of conclusive evidence that Trump's specific agenda is very popular. In a context in which there's a lot of distrust of government, it's not obvious that strong executive overreach is the answer to that distrust.

Sargent: That brings up what you wrote in your piece, which is, One of the big questions right now is what's going on with what you call the anti-authoritarian majority. Even during the election we saw majorities taking Trump's criminality seriously, majorities opposing the authoritarian threats and so forth, but obviously that anti-authoritarian majority didn't materialize at the ballot box this time. Now, however, people are seeing the authoritarian rule up front. The Post poll finds that 66 percent say Trump shouldn't be able to freeze funding without congressional approval, and 57 percent say he's gone beyond his authority. CNN finds 52 percent say he's overstepped his powers--that includes 57 percent of independents. Julia, is this a situation where people didn't really know what this would look like until they saw it?