{"id":11182,"date":"2026-08-03T00:53:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-03T00:53:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cannabis.net\/blog\/opinion\/trumps-cannabis-trojan-horse-why-stoners-are-losing-faith"},"modified":"2026-08-03T00:53:00","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T00:53:00","slug":"trumps-cannabis-trojan-horse-why-stoners-are-losing-faith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/trumps-cannabis-trojan-horse-why-stoners-are-losing-faith\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s Cannabis Trojan Horse: Why Stoners Are Losing Faith"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"wp_fb_like_button\" style=\"margin:5px 0 5px 5px;float:right;height:100px;\"><script src=\"http:\/\/connect.facebook.net\/en_US\/all.js#xfbml=1\"><\/script><fb:like href=\"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/trumps-cannabis-trojan-horse-why-stoners-are-losing-faith\/\" send=\"true\" layout=\"standard\" width=\"450\" show_faces=\"false\" font=\"arial\" action=\"like\" colorscheme=\"light\"><\/fb:like><\/div><p><img src=\"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/trumps-cannabis-trojan-horse-why-stoners-are-losing-faith.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p><img alt=\"trump trojan horse\" src=\"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/trumps-cannabis-trojan-horse-why-stoners-are-losing-faith-1.jpg\" \/><\/p>\n<p>There\u2019s an old rule in politics: you can fool a voting bloc once with a promise, but you can\u2019t keep fooling them once they start doing math. Cannabis consumers just did the math.<\/p>\n<p>According to the latest quarterly <a href=\"https:\/\/www.marijuanamoment.net\/marijuana-consumers-support-for-trumps-actions-drops-as-most-dont-believe-rescheduling-will-be-completed-this-year-poll-shows\/\">NuggMD\/Marijuana Moment tracking poll<\/a>, only 48 percent of marijuana consumers now approve or strongly approve of the <a href=\"https:\/\/cannabis.net\/blog\/opinion\/trump-2.0-cannabis-reform-what-to-expect-when-republicans-control-washington\">Trump administration\u2019s cannabis actions<\/a>. That\u2019s down from 73 percent last quarter. Thirteen percent disapprove, and a striking 40 percent have simply checked out into \u201cno opinion\u201d territory. When four in ten of your most engaged constituency shrugs at you, that\u2019s not apathy. That\u2019s disillusionment wearing apathy\u2019s coat.<\/p>\n<p>I want to sit with that number for a second, because it\u2019s not a random wobble. It\u2019s a straight line down from a peak, and the peak itself tells you everything about how this game is played.<\/p>\n<p>Rewind to the end of 2025. Cannabis consumer approval of Trump sat at a pathetic 6 percent. Then, in December, the president signed an executive order directing officials to move forward on rescheduling. Approval rocketed to 73 percent almost overnight. That\u2019s not enthusiasm for a policy that had been implemented \u2014 it\u2019s enthusiasm for a promise. A press release. An order to consider doing something.<\/p>\n<p>Then, in April, Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche actually did something concrete: he <a href=\"https:\/\/cannabis.net\/blog\/opinion\/the-rescheduling-circus-notes-from-the-cannabis-rescheduling-hearing-you-might-have-missed\">reclassified state-licensed medical cannabis<\/a> and FDA-approved cannabis products from Schedule I to Schedule III. A separate hearing began, overseen by a DEA judge, to decide whether to move all marijuana \u2014 recreational included \u2014 to Schedule III more broadly. Testimony in that hearing wrapped up last week. Final briefs are due August 17. Then the judge makes a recommendation, and the DEA administrator makes the actual call.<\/p>\n<p>Notice what\u2019s missing from that timeline: recreational users. Medical cannabis patients got their reclassification. Everybody else got a hearing schedule and a promise that the grown-ups are still discussing it.<\/p>\n<p>That gap between \u201cmedical rescheduling happened\u201d and \u201cthe thing that would actually matter to the 24 states with adult-use markets is still pending\u201d is exactly where consumer trust went to die. NuggMD\u2019s director of content, Tyler Elson, put it plainly: there\u2019s a clear divide between support for medical rescheduling and support for the broader recreational reforms consumers actually wanted. A separate poll this month found most cannabis consumers don\u2019t even believe rescheduling will be fully implemented by the end of the year.<\/p>\n<p>Here\u2019s the part I find almost admirable in its cynicism: <a href=\"https:\/\/cannabis.net\/blog\/opinion\/88-and-rising-america-has-already-made-up-its-mind-on-cannabis-legalization\">54 percent of cannabis consumers<\/a> say they\u2019d support the administration \u201cmuch more\u201d or \u201ca bit more\u201d if it fully legalized cannabis. Thirty-nine percent said \u201cmuch more.\u201d That\u2019s a voting bloc handing the administration a blueprint for how to keep their support, and the administration choosing, instead, to litigate a Schedule III hearing that a House committee already voted to try to block in May \u2014 while cannabis companies, per Marijuana Moment\u2019s own newsletter this week, are busy cutting checks to a Trump-linked PAC. Draw your own conclusions about where the actual lobbying energy is going.<\/p>\n<p>Now, depending on who you ask, Trump is either heaven-sent or a spawn of Satan. I fall into neither camp. My working theory is that Trump functioned less as an ideological standard-bearer and more as a hostile takeover vehicle for a Republican Party that had grown allergic to its own base\u2019s actual grievances.<\/p>\n<p>Here\u2019s the thing nobody on cable news wants to say plainly: most Americans didn\u2019t care whether their neighbor transitioned, came out, or lived however they wanted. But during the Biden years, a specific strain of institutional moral pressure \u2014 the sense that disagreement, or even silence, made you a bigot by default \u2014 combined with Twitter-era censorship, unchecked illegal immigration, and eye-watering federal spending to produce a genuine backlash. Not necessarily a backlash against the underlying causes, but against the tone. Against being lectured. A lot of people who otherwise couldn\u2019t care less about culture-war minutiae looked at the whole circus and said, essentially, \u201cto hell with this,\u201d and reached for the political option that felt like a middle finger to the people doing the lecturing.<\/p>\n<p>Trump was that middle finger. The \u201cdevil we know\u201d option. Except this devil turned out to be running a different con than the one his voters signed up for. Cannabis reform is a clean case study: reform is \u201coverwhelmingly popular\u201d with voters, according to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt back in April \u2014 and it is, genuinely, popular across party lines. So the administration invoked it, took credit for an executive order, and has since let the actual mechanism grind through a DEA hearing process that\u2019s simultaneously being challenged in court by the drug-testing industry, a pharmaceutical company, and legalization opponents. Promise the base the moon, deliver a hearing schedule, bank the approval-rating bump in the meantime. That\u2019s not reform. That\u2019s harvesting a constituency\u2019s hope as a renewable resource.<\/p>\n<p>I don\u2019t think cannabis consumers losing trust in Trump is a new story. It\u2019s the entirely predictable next chapter of an old one \u2014 the moment when a grift\u2019s arithmetic stops working because the marks have started keeping score. And the interesting question isn\u2019t really about marijuana policy anymore. It\u2019s about what happens to a coalition once enough of its pieces figure out they were promised more than they\u2019re getting.<\/p>\n<p>I think we\u2019re watching the early tremors of a real political realignment, and I don\u2019t think it plays out over one election cycle \u2014 I think it\u2019s a decade-long process. Tucker Carlson and others have been floating third-party trial balloons, and for the first time in my adult life, the conditions for an actual third party feel less like fantasy and more like arithmetic. An \u201cAmerica First\u201d formation that\u2019s genuinely populist, skeptical of endless foreign entanglements, and unbeholden to either party\u2019s donor class could peel off pieces of both coalitions \u2014 the MAGA voters who feel used, and the disaffected independents who never had a real home to begin with. Whether that formation would frame Israel policy as the central grievance, as some in that lane already do, I genuinely don\u2019t know \u2014 that\u2019s speculation on my part, not reporting, and it\u2019s a claim serious people disagree about. But the underlying mechanism \u2014 a base realizing its loyalty was rented rather than earned \u2014 is not speculation. That\u2019s just what a 25-point quarterly approval collapse looks like in real time.<\/p>\n<p>Cannabis consumers aren\u2019t a fringe constituency anymore \u2014 they\u2019re a multi-billion-dollar, multi-state voting bloc that helped hand Trump credibility on an issue where his own party\u2019s committees are actively trying to slow him down. When 40 percent of that bloc goes numb and 54 percent tell you exactly what would win them back, and the response is another hearing date, you\u2019re not looking at a policy failure. You\u2019re looking at a trust failure. And trust, unlike a Schedule III filing, doesn\u2019t come back just because the paperwork eventually clears.<\/p>\n<p>August 17 is the next real checkpoint. I\u2019ll be watching the briefs, not the press releases.<\/p>\n<h3><strong>THE RISE AND FALL OF CANNABIS UNDER TRUMP, READ ON&#8230;<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/cannabis.net\/blog\/opinion\/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-cannabis-industry-is-there-any-hope-under-trump-2.0\"><img alt=\"cannabis under trump\" src=\"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/08\/trumps-cannabis-trojan-horse-why-stoners-are-losing-faith-2.jpg\" \/><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/cannabis.net\/blog\/opinion\/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-cannabis-industry-is-there-any-hope-under-trump-2.0\"><strong>THE RISE AND FALL OF CANNABIS UNDER TRUMP, IS THERE HOPE?<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There\u2019s an old rule in politics: you can fool a voting bloc once with a promise, but you can\u2019t keep fooling them once they start doing math. Cannabis consumers just did the math. According to the latest quarterly NuggMD\/Marijuana Moment tracking poll, only 48 percent of marijuana consumers now approve or strongly approve of the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[9,1,3,61,1736],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11182"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11182\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cannitrol.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}