The Shortest Of Honeymoons

I said months ago that nothing would happen to Trump from a legal standpoint unless his base turned on him, and angered GOP primary voters were willing to look the other way as "RINO"s in Congress took action. Politico puts forth the argument that Trump's base may be reaching this point.

Donald Trump’s true believers are losing the faith.

As Trump struggles to keep his campaign promises and flirts with political moderation, his most steadfast supporters — from veteran advisers to anti-immigration activists to the volunteers who dropped their jobs to help elect him — are increasingly dismayed by the direction of his presidency.

Their complaints range from Trump’s embrace of an interventionist foreign policy to his less hawkish tone on China to, most recently, his marginalization of his nationalist chief strategist, Steve Bannon. But the crux of their disillusionment, interviews with nearly two dozen Trump loyalists reveal, is a belief that Trump the candidate bears little resemblance to Trump the president. He’s failing, in their view, to deliver on his promise of a transformative “America First” agenda driven by hard-edged populism.

"Donald Trump dropped an emotional anchor. He captured how Americans feel," said Tania Vojvodic, a fervent Trump supporter who founded one of his first campaign volunteer networks. "We expect him to keep his word, and right now he's not keeping his word."

Earlier this week, Vojvodic launched a Facebook group called, “The concerned support base of President Trump,” which quickly drew several dozen sign-ups. She also changed the banner on her Facebook page to a picture of Bannon accompanied by the declaration: “Mr. President: I stand with Steve Bannon.”

"I'm not so infatuated with Trump that I can't see the facts," she said. "People's belief, their trust in him, it’s declining."

The swiftness and abruptness of Trump’s shift from bomb-throwing populist outsider to a more mainstream brand of Republican has taken the president’s stalwarts by surprise.

“It was like, here’s the chance to do something different. And that’s why people’s hopes are dashed,” said Lee Stranahan, who, as a former writer at Breitbart News, once worked with Bannon. “There was always the question of, ‘Did he really believe this stuff?’ Apparently, the answer is, ‘Not as much as you’d like.’” 

I think the real issue is that "Trump the winner" is turning out to be "Trump the giant loser", and nobody likes a loser, particularly angry racist white Trump voters who finally thought they were in charge of America and that the rest of us were second-class citizens at best.  Suddenly the fact that the GOP can't govern worth a damn domestically and has no idea what they are doing on foreign policy is hitting home, and they don't like it one bit.

We'll see how much this affects his popularity, but this is the kind of thing that needs to happen in order for Republicans to be more scared of the people who want Trump gone than the people who want Trump to reign forever.