Is this what you voted for?

President Trump is off to a manic start, carpet bombing Washington with executive orders of dubious legality, firing hundreds of thousands of federal workers and souring relations with America’s neighbors and allies.

I get that Trump was elected to shake up a status quo that working-class voters believe stacks the odds against them. But Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) was right: Trump has no mandate to inflict ruinous trade wars on America’s friends, disable the federal government rather than reform it and throw Ukraine to the Russian wolves. 

Green’s protest got him ejected from the president’s stemwinder in Congress Tuesday night, during which Trump served up his usual smorgasbord of self-congratulatory fantasies to rapt Republicans and dejected Democrats.  

We shouldn’t forget that half the country didn’t vote for Trump and endorses neither his brazen power grabs nor his embrace of old ideas — high trade barriers and isolationism — that failed our country badly in the past. At 45 percent, Trump’s personal approval rating is the lowest for any newly elected president since he set the record low of 44 percent in 2017.  

Republicans no doubt are thrilled their hero is “owning the libs.” But what matters now is whether Trump can deliver tangible benefits to the swing voters who put him narrowly over the top — independents, moderate Republicans and Democratic defectors, especially noncollege Blacks and Latinos.  

They voted for economic policies that lower the cost of living and create better opportunities for non-college workers, a fiscally disciplined government that delivers public services more quickly and efficiently, major reforms in our broken immigration system, greater public safety and a break from identity group tribalism. 

Trump isn’t delivering on any of these fronts.  

Instead, he is launching a global trade war: massive tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China and “reciprocal tariffs” on any country that has higher tariffs than ours.   

His rationale is murky. Sometimes he says it’s to punish our neighbors for not sufficiently policing their borders, at others Trump oversells tariffs as a miraculous tool for raising revenues and reviving manufacturing.  

What they really do is raise prices. 

“Slapping tariffs on everything Americans buy from Canada, Mexico and China will mean higher prices on groceries, gas and cars, with fewer jobs and lower pay when our closest trading partners respond to Trump’s trade war by buying fewer American products,” notes Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore).  

Republicans trust Trump on tariffs, but other voters have qualms. A recent Public First poll finds that only 28 percent of Americans support tariffs on Canada, while 43 percent are opposed. Consumer confidence and the stock markets also are plummeting.    

High living costs were by far the voters’ top concern last year and the main reason Democrats lost. Trump promised to start bringing down prices on day one, but his signature economic policy points in the opposite direction.  

Almost as perverse is Trump’s indiscriminate mauling of the federal government in the name of efficiency and cost-cutting.  

Americans don’t need to be convinced that the federal government has become too big, slow and rule-bound. They want fixes but worry that Trump and Elon Musk have no coherent plan for making government work better. 

Musk and his minions have summarily fired over 200,000 workers and are eviscerating whole agencies they don’t like — the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Education Department and, oddly, the National Weather Service. 

Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency briefly sacked over 350 nuclear engineers, then hastily hired them back when told the government couldn’t guarantee the security and safety of America’s nuclear arsenal without them.

Trump evinces no empathy for government workers whose lives have been abruptly turned upside down by Musk’s slash-and-burn assaults. The billionaires couldn’t care less about the millions of destitute and vulnerable people who rely on U.S. foreign aid — which costs all of 0.7 percent of the federal budget. 

Compare Trump’s chainsaw massacre to President Bill Clinton’s skillful “reinventing government” push. Working with public employees, “REGO” managed to eliminate more than 400,000 jobs and boost productivity without the humiliating and cruel tactics that Trump and Musk seem to relish. 

Recent polls find that Americans oppose shutting down U.S. foreign aid by 21 points (59-38) and that 56 percent of voters — including 60 percent of independents — think the Trump-Musk cuts are doing more harm than good. 

Finally, Trump’s abandonment of Ukraine and disrespect for U.S. allies also seem to be giving many voters buyer's remorse. 

Last week, the world watched the sickening spectacle of the president and vice president parroting Kremlin talking points while trying to bully their guest, Ukrainian President Volodymir Zelensky, into agreeing to a Munich-style peace deal. An irate Trump preposterously blamed Ukraine for starting the conflict but could not find a cross word for the real culprit, Russian strongman Vladimir Putin.    

Trump’s reputation as an artful dealmaker is unlikely to survive his one-sided “negotiations” with the wily Putin. Neither Zelensky nor our European allies are invited to the talks, which envision Ukraine ceding more than 20 percent of its territory and any hope of NATO membership in return for a cease-fire.  

This week a petulant Trump made good his threat to cut off U.S. aid to Ukraine. This is a shameful betrayal of Ukraine’s fight for freedom as well as America’s finest tradition of standing up to tyranny and oppression.   

Trump is extinguishing America’s beacon of liberty and democracy at the worst possible moment, as the world backslides into the same belligerent ethno-nationalism that sparked two calamitous wars in the last century.  

Is this what most Americans voted for? Democrats should be confident in answering with an emphatic “no.” 

Will Marshall is the founder and president of Progressive Policy Institute.