GOP begging Trump to 'at least pretend to be normal': conservative

Conservatives Charlie Sykes and Matt Lewis are curious if President Donald Trump can possibly get any lower.

New tracking polls out this week show Trump has dipped to 33 percent approval. In the background, Trump is spending most of his time on building his ballroom and other design projects.

"When you tell me this, Charlie, I'm tempted to ask, how did we elect this guy and how is it — but it is catching up to him," Lewis said, citing the new Reuters survey.

Lewis went on to say that there are plenty of companies doing polls about Trump approval, and "this is not an outlier." Sykes said the polls can be trusted as part of a trend, and an average of all polls show that it is consistent.

"I think the hardest thing in the last few years is that weird sense of vertigo, where you're going: 'This is crazy. This is ugly. This is wrong. This is corrupt. How is it that other people are not seeing the same thing?'" asked Sykes. "How is it that you are okay with this? Or you don't understand what's going on?"

What the new Reuters poll suggests, he continued, is that two-thirds of Americans do actually understand. The one-third left has been the floor for Trump's base vote. Those Sykes described MAGA as a "religious faith."

"This has got to restore some confidence in the electorate because he has worked very hard, hasn't he Matt, to squander that coalition that got him elected in 2024. It's like he's gone down the box and — who can I alienate?" Sykes said. "How can I take these issues and and s—— them? He's done a rather impressive job."

Lewis recalled a conversation he was having with David Frum, the former Bush speechwriter who now writes for The Atlantic. Frum told him that former President Herbert Hoover was running for reelection in 1932 in the middle of the Great Depression, and even Hoover still managed to get 39 percent of the vote.

"But basically, we can't expect the numbers to go that much lower because even Herbert Hoover, three years into the Great Depression, got something close to the numbers that Trump is now getting. So, I don't know how much lower it goes," he added.

Sykes called the numbers similar to those after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

He added that Trump continues to sound more and more tone deaf. "Every day he comes out and he says something that if you are a Republican and you ... have got to be going, are you kidding me? Could you at least pretend to be a normal human being for like five minutes? Could you make a pivot to all of that?"

Sykes also noted that all of the self-inflicted wounds that the White House has faced for the past two years all come back to "the psyche and the obsessions of Donald Trump, who is increasingly isolated in a bubble with people who tell him exactly what he wants to hear. Which is another reason I think he sounds tone deaf."

He recalled that New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman calculated that about 70 percent of Trump's brain is focused on his vanity projects rather than doing what Sykes called "real things."

"There are no grownups saying, 'Donald! At least act like you care about the real world!'" Sykes added.