President Donald Trump’s coalition is “falling apart,” according to columnist Matt K. Lewis, who writes at The Hill that Trump’s list of accomplishments seems more like “a cry for help.”
Pointing to Trump’s rapid subject-changing, Lewis noted that the president kicked off the new year by invading Venezuela and capturing Nicolás Maduro.
“From there, things escalated briskly,” he wrote. “He defended an ICE agent who shot and killed a protester in Minneapolis named Renee Good. He threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act. He threatened to take Greenland — possibly by force. He threatened to slap tariffs on European allies over Greenland. He suggested his failure to win the Nobel Peace Prize justified taking Greenland. And he almost failed to issue any acknowledgment of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, waiting until bedtime to do so.”
Lewis says that while somewhere there is a “constituency” for each of these individual actions, “taken together, they resemble a blitzkrieg against public opinion.”
He summed up Trump’s low poll numbers and concluded, “America has seen this movie before, has been reminded of how it ends, and is already edging toward the exit.”
So, if the 2024 election held today, it’s “not at all clear” that Trump would win. he said, in part because “Trump’s winning coalition was so sprawling and incoherent that pleasing one group would automatically enrage another.”
So what’s happened in the past year?
“Trump is very good at campaigning and very bad at governing. This explains almost everything that has happened since he took office one year ago this week, including the nation’s rising consumption of Rolaids.”
Disappointment from the “newer members of his coalition” came from “the ultimate realization that Trump’s most electorally appealing promises — such as lowering grocery prices on day one — are never actually going to happen. Indeed, Trump’s policies — tariffs, for example — were almost custom-made to increase grocery prices, which is generally frowned upon by people who eat.”
As it turns out, “Trump’s true superpower … only works when he is not actually in charge.”