Trump's Base Continues To Crumble
Despite the multitude of media reports and the apparently overwhelming belief of most Republican members of Congress, Donald Trump’s base is crumbling. The more even his rabid supporters see of Trump, the less they apparently like him.
The latest Pew poll shows Trump with an abysmal 32% approval rating and a record 63% of American voters now disapprove of the President. This is the most underwater a President has been after his first year in office in about 70 years, since the Truman administration.
Worse, his support among the absolute core of his base is starting to deteriorate badly. Among Republicans in general and voters who lean Republican, his approval is now down to just 76%, an 8 point drop since shortly after his inauguration. Even this number may be somewhat positively skewed as other studies have shown that the number of self-identified Republicans has dropped by five points since Trump’s election, meaning that the 76% may actually represent an even smaller pool of voters than it seemingly indicates.
Among his most loyal and rabid supporters, white evangelical Protestants, his support has fallen to just 61%, a massive 17 point drop since his inauguration. Among another source of the President’s support, white voters with less than a college education, Trump is in negative territory with only 46% of those voters voicing approval. Trump’s approval among older voters, 55 and over, has also fallen anywhere from 5 to 8 points since his inauguration and sits in just the mid 30s.
As the Mueller investigation closes in on Trump and his family, more and more Americans believe that the Trump campaign had inappropriate contacts with the Russians during the election. Nearly 60% of voters now feel that senior Trump officials probably or definitely had improper communications with the Kremlin. Strikingly, that now includes 27% of Republicans. Numbers like that and the almost daily avalanche of new evidence of collusion and cover-up will make it hard for even the Republicans in Congress to do nothing if, but more probably, when Trump fires Mueller.
Admittedly 76% is around the normal approval rating from a president’s party at this point in his term. But remember that Trump was and is massively unpopular with both Democrats and independents and relied on overwhelming Republican support to just squeak by in the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote by about 3 million. More importantly, the trend line among Republicans has gone steadily downward since his inauguration and there is not much to indicate that path will not continue.
Even Trump’s base hates what Trump and the GOP are calling their big “win”, the massively unpopular tax bill that is viewed unfavorably by nearly two-thirds of voters. And even Trump voters recognize the bill as an enormous giveaway to the rich that will not benefit and perhaps even harm them. And now both Congressional Republicans and the Trump administration have publicly stated that the plan for 2018 is to cut Medicaid even further and go after Medicare and conceivably even Social Security. That is sure to be even more unpopular with even Trump’s base.
While his own supporters may be liking Trump less and less as time goes on, they hate the Republicans in Congress even more. And, as the Mueller investigation closes in, the effects of the tax bill become clearer, and Congress goes after Medicare and Medicaid, you can bet that Trump will turn on his own party, in much the same way he turned on the House version of ACA repeal, in order to shore up his shriveling base. But Republicans in Congress seemed determined to tolerate him in order to fulfill their obligations to the plutocrats that support them. What’s more incredible is that our entire political environment continues to be driven and dominated by a smaller and smaller minority of the population. The repudiation in 2018 could be massive.
