MAGA loves the deep state now

Republicans hated the FBI until it became Trump’s FBI

Former FBI Director James Comey testified that President Trump had badgered him over the Russia investigation. This was Trump’s first foray into politicizing the agency. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski/AFP via Getty)

Welcome back to The Argument’s poll series, where we survey Americans on the issues everyone’s fighting about. Our full crosstabs are available below the paywall at the end of this post. Our last surveys have asked about crime and public safety, the economy, gender issues, immigration, education and parenting, the lingering politics of COVID-19, immigration, AI, and free speech. The Argument’s full methodology can be read here.

---

All of a sudden, Republicans love the deep state.

In The Argument’s poll on crime and public safety, fielded from April 20 to 23, 2026, among 1,516 registered voters, we tested support for various law enforcement agencies. Among respondents overall, local police got the highest favorability (70% had a very or somewhat favorable opinion), followed by the TSA (58%), while agencies like the FBI (50%) and CIA (45%) got lower marks. ICE was not only the least popular (40% support) but — as you might expect — the most politically polarized. Seventy-nine percent of self-described Republicans supported ICE. Just 10% of Democrats did.

That Republicans like cops (81%) more than Democrats (65%) is old news, but what caught my eye was how quickly Trump has managed to make federal law enforcement agencies — that his supporters once derided as full of corrupt, biased, deep-state Democrats — popular with his base.

Over the past decade, the FBI has been more widely supported by Democrats after Trump declared war on it in his first administration.

To put this in context, between 2022 and now, the partisan gap in opinion of the FBI has shifted from D+50 in a Gallup poll asking about job performance to R+34 in our poll asking about favorability. Republicans’ favorability for the CIA was also 27 points higher than Democrats’.

These massive shifts far outstrip the effect you would expect merely from the change in administrations. In the past year and a half, Trump has installed loyalists and pressured out agents who he viewed as political enemies for working on cases like those against the Jan. 6 rioters. As a result, partisan sentiment on agencies like the FBI has flipped.