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The president has opened fissures in his base by starting a war he couldn’t finish with Iran, stoking inflation and offending Christians. Barred from running again, he may feel he has nothing to lose
Lance Johnson voted for Donald Trump three times. Now he is feeling buyer’s remorse. “I haven’t been too happy with the third time around,” said the 47-year-old contractor, sitting at a bar in Crescent Springs, Kentucky. “We’re supposed to not start any new wars. Prices were supposed to come down. We were promised a lot of things and we’re not getting them.”
Johnson is not the only Trump voter having doubts about a US president who, after defying political gravity for a decade, finally seems to be crashing back to earth. The past two weeks have arguably been the most bruising of Trump’s two terms in office, suggesting that his tried and trusted playbook could finally be falling apart.
Having launched an unpopular war with Iran, the president was scrambling for a way out as fuel prices climb; he insulted the pope and posted an AI image of himself as Jesus Christ on social media; he lost in a court hearing over a lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal newspaper relating to the Jeffrey Epstein files; and his intervention on behalf of an autocratic ally in Hungary was rebuked by that country’s voters.
Just 38% of voters approve of the way Trump is handling his job as president, while 55% disapprove, according to a poll released this week by Quinnipiac University. A mere 36% of voters approve of the way the president is handling the situation with Iran, while 58% disapprove. Two in three voters blame him for the recent rise in gas prices.
Elaine Kamarck, a former official in the Bill Clinton White House, said: “He’s in the most serious trouble he’s been in, and that includes his first term, where there were some constraints on him. It’s hard to tell whether it’s the absence of constraints or the fact that he’s getting old and cranky but he seems to have a dramatic loss of judgment. The best description of Trump – apparently it’s British slang – is shambolic.”
Since he ran for president in 2016, Trump has cultivated an aura of invincibility, memorably declaring that he could shoot someone on New York’s Fifth Avenue and not lose any voters. Insulting war veterans or being caught on tape boasting about grabbing women’s private parts could not derail him; if anything, his coarse, taboo-busting style animated a support base sick of establishment politicians.
The aura was punctured by the Covid pandemic and election defeat in 2020, only for Trump and his allies to spend years spinning a false narrative that the election had been stolen. He survived an assassination attempt by inches in 2024 and roared back into power, claiming that he had been “saved by God to make America great again”.
Although the honeymoon did not last long as Trump imposed sweeping tariffs, federal government cuts and hardline immigration enforcement, his support base kept the faith. But now the unlikely coalition that put Trump back in the White House is unravelling as he alienates Maga influencers, religious conservatives, anti-interventionists who wanted an end to forever wars and anyone who craves relief from years of inflation.
A majority of Catholic voters supported Trump in his 2024 presidential victory. But last Sunday night he launched an unprecedented verbal assault on Pope Leo XIV, the first US-born pope, calling him “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy” after Leo spoke out against Trump’s bellicose threats to Iran. The president was swiftly condemned by Catholic leaders, including conservative-leaning bishops.
Then Trump posted an AI image seeming to depict himself as Jesus healing a bedridden man, surrounded by bald eagles and the US flag, on his Truth Social platform. The backlash was swift. David Brody, a prominent Trump-supporting commentator with the Christian Broadcasting Network, responded: “TAKE THIS DOWN, MR. PRESIDENT. You’re not God. None of us are. This goes too far. It crosses the line.”
By midday on Monday, the image had been removed. The president claimed that he never intended to liken himself to Jesus when he posted the picture. “How did they come up with that?” he asked unconvincingly. “It’s supposed to be me as a doctor, making people better. And I do make people better. I make people a lot better.”
But on Wednesday Trump posted a new image of himself being embraced by Jesus while bathed in an angelic light against a US flag backdrop.
Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance studies at the non-partisan Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, observed: “Taking on the pope, allowing memes to go out that pretend he’s Jesus Christ: that is absolutely blasphemous. It’s even offensive to people who are not religious but it’s particularly offensive to religious people and many of them – Catholics and evangelicals – have been part of his base.
“Between the war cracking up the America First part of his base over no foreign entanglements, and this religious stuff cracking up the religious part of his base, I’d say that this is the first time we’ve seen cracks in his support from the base and that’s a big, big development.”
Conservatives agree that the voters’ patience is wearing thin. Erick Erickson, a radio host based in Atlanta, Georgia, told Politico: “They’re not getting what they voted for to begin with. On top of that, whether he’s mocking their religion intentionally or not, he still is. I think we are looking not really at a Maga crack-up per se but a lot of the base becoming exasperated enough to start looking beyond Trump.”
Trump purports to despise nothing more than losers. But his own losses continue to pile up. This week a federal court dismissed his defamation lawsuit that claimed Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal tarnished his reputation with an article describing a birthday card to deceased sex offender Epstein bearing Trump’s signature. District judge Darrin Gayles said the president had not come close to meeting the “actual malice” standard that public figures must clear in defamation. Trump has said he will refile the lawsuit.
Meanwhile Trump suffered a setback on the global stage with the election result in Hungary. His vice-president, JD Vance, travelled to the country in a late bid to bolster Viktor Orbán and put Trump on a speakerphone to address a rally but it was all in vain as rival Péter Magyar stormed to victory. The journalist and historian Anne Applebaum wrote in the Atlantic: “Orbán’s loss brings to an end the assumption of inevitability that has pervaded the Maga movement.”
But perhaps nothing threatens that support more than the war in Iran, launched with Israel on 28 February without any evidence of an imminent threat. Trump has claimed victory several times but the Iranian regime remains entrenched and radicalised, its nuclear ambitions still intact, emboldened by its ability to choke oil commerce in the strait of Hormuz. The US has also lost credibility with European and Middle Eastern allies.
His frustration boiling over, Trump lashed out in an Easter Sunday social media post: “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH. Praise be to Allah.” Two days later, he warned Iran that “a whole civilization will die tonight”. The genocidal threat and mocking use of religious language was too much for podcasters such as Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones and Candace Owens, all former allies.
Some warn that the Iran war could become Trump’s equivalent of Hurricane Katrina, the catastrophic tropical cyclone that killed 1,392 people in and around New Orleans in 2005 and inflicted huge damage on President George W Bush’s reputation, from which he never fully recovered.
Olivia Troye, a former intelligence official in the first Trump administration, said: “This will follow him because he did run on a platform of no wars and clearly there is no end to this conflict in sight and it’s only getting worse. This is a conflict that he started that no one on his team in that cabinet knows how to get out of. I don’t know how you look at this man and not truly see him for what he is: a fraud.”
Trump ran for president promising to lower prices but his approval rating on the issue of inflation is lower than Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden’s at the same stage of their presidencies. Last week he admitted that the cost of oil and gasoline may remain high beyond November’s midterm elections, telling Fox News: “It could be, or the same, or maybe a little bit higher, but it should be around the same.”
Troye, who this week launched a run for Congress as a Democrat, added: “The longer this war goes on, the more it impacts us here at home. Gas prices are going up. We haven’t even seen the impact on our grocery store prices yet because that’s going to have longer-term effects. Farming communities are upset right now because it’s going to hurt them in terms of their access to fertiliser.”
Trump has faced political crises before and bounced back, most notably after the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol in 2021, when the Republican party seemed ready to abandon him – only to nominate him for president again three years later. This time he is constitutionally barred from running, which could mean he feels like he has nothing to lose.
Anthony Scaramucci, a former White House communications director, wrote on the X social media platform: “Here’s the real question: Does he care about any of this? I would submit to everybody – he does not. He’s entered the nihilistic stage of his political career. The polls don’t matter. The people don’t matter. The consequences don’t matter. That is the most dangerous version of this man.”
An approval rating hitting the lowest levels of his second term in office is raising concern among Republicans that his party is poised to lose control of Congress in the midterm elections. A Democratic majority in either chamber could launch investigations into the Trump administration while blocking much of his legislative agenda. That could make the president more unhinged than ever as he refuses to accept lame duck status.
Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “Donald Trump is a wounded political animal. There’s no fading away for this guy. The more damaged he gets, the more reckless he gets and he is someone who is so consumed with a delusion of his grandeur that he’s a politically dangerous existentially threatening figure in America and the global scene. He is unbound. This is a reckless force moving through America with enormous global complications.”
