An old proverb says a leader without followers is “only taking a walk.”
If that’s the case, then the strutting President Trump has turned his presidency into a very lonely walk.
A Morning Consult poll released last week found Trump losing support in states he easily carried last year. He is down 23 points in Tennessee since his inauguration in January, down 21 points in Mississippi, down 20 in Kentucky, down 19 in Kansas and down 17 in Indiana.
At the three-quarter mark of his first year in office, Trump is the least popular new president in history.
On Capitol Hill, House and Senate Republicans are also walking away from Trump.
“Last time I checked, you are the president of the United States, so tweeting out these tacky insults just seems beneath you,” Neil Cavuto of Fox News said on his show last week. “You are running out of friends faster than you are running out of time. You might not like Bob Corker, but a lot of senators do, and you need those senators, sir.”
A new Quinnipiac poll last week found that 49 percent of voters disapprove of the way Trump is handling taxes and just 37 percent approve.
Trump has also failed to deliver on his campaign promise to build a southern border wall and have Mexico pay for it. He continues to say it will get done. But, again, polls show voters don’t want a wall.
Similarly, Trump seems unaware that a majority of Americans now approve of the Affordable Care Act, also known as ObamaCare, and want its problems fixed so it can continue.
Instead, having failed to win a full repeal of the health-care law from the Republican majority in Congress, he signed an executive order allowing low-cost insurance to be sold across state lines.
That has been tried before and has a sad history of consumer fraud and regulatory confusion.
So it’s no wonder Trump now walks alone. He remains a celebrity figure for his hardcore base. But 10 months into his presidency, Republicans are starting to drift away as he fails to deliver on nearly every major campaign promise he made.
That’s not my opinion. That’s a demonstrable fact.
-The Hill