At last, Trump's true believers are starting to abandon him for reality
Never mind being the worst president ever — Trump isn't even a decent con man. Every grifter knows that the most important part of the job is blowing town before your marks can figure out they've been screwed.
Trump is like the drug dealer who sells you oregano instead of weed and then tries to connect with you three days later on LinkedIn.
Between the House Obamacare repeal bill that he didn't quite understand and his new proposed budget, Trump wants to cut — oh, something like a trillion dollars from Medicaid. (It's impossible to know the exact figure because the White House doesn't even know, but it's a ton. And the gruesome details aren't really that important, honestly. If you're a poor person and Paul Ryan is elbow-deep into you with a white-hot poker, you're probably not going to tell him he could have gotten the exact same set of fireplace tools at Home Depot for $20 cheaper.)
So, yeah, Trump was carried to victory in November largely on the strength of his sky-high popularity with poor white people, whose racial animus he cynically encouraged and exploited at every opportunity.
To set himself apart from other Republicans, he promised he wouldn't touch Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid. Then he proposed massive cuts to Medicaid. (So, to summarize, he said no one respects Medicaid more than he does; he touched Medicaid after promising he would never do such a thing; and now Medicaid will never be the same. Why does that sound so familiar?)
He later said he would provide "insurance for everybody" after repealing Obamacare. Needless to say, that's not happening.
And now millions of people who depend on Medicaid are, to put it as delicately as possible under the current circumstances, fucked.
So just four months and change into his term, people are starting to catch on that they've been sold a $200 bag of oregano.
The results? The redoubtable Nate Silver at 538.com has the skinny:
"Trump’s base seems to be eroding. There’s been a considerable decline in the number of Americans who strongly approve of Trump, from a peak of around 30 percent in February to just 21 or 22 percent of the electorate now. (The decline in Trump’s strong approval ratings is larger than the overall decline in his approval ratings, in fact.) Far from having unconditional love from his base, Trump has already lost almost a third of his strong support. And voters who strongly disapprove of Trump outnumber those who strongly approve of him by about a 2-to-1 ratio, which could presage an 'enthusiasm gap' that works against Trump at the midterms."
Oh, the midterms. They're a long way off, but unless Trump is tossed in a gulag and quickly replaced with a much more intelligent doppelgänger (or even just one who can correctly pronounce words that unremarkable third-graders have mastered), he will continue to be Trump, and that won't be good for anybody. Least of all Republicans.
