Day 144: Donald Trump’s Defenders Are Disappearing
No man is an island, but Trump is awfully close at the moment.
If you watch cable news and something seemed off on Sunday morning, something was. Donald Trump didn’t have a single surrogate on any show defending policies or decisions or promoting his agenda.
After last week’s “infrastructure week” flopped and was overshadowed by the Comey testimony, Trump needed to rally. That’s what made the surrogates’ absences so odd.
While Trump clearly believes himself to be his own best surrogate, it’s not possible to shape an entire narrative — much less multiple — from a phone 140 characters at a time. Sure, he tried by hammering out a few tweets. But even those were the same tired, repetitive tropes he repeats endlessly: Comey is the worst, Democrats obstruct, the economic growth has been amazing (even though that has more to do with Barack Obama than Trump’s policies).
But where are Trump’s defenders?
Congressional Republicans continue to inch away from Trump publicly…
…and privately.
Even with Trump’s popularity teetering for the last few years among many elected Republicans, it still seemed far-fetched that one would publicly praise Obama over the elected Republican under any circumstance. But it hasn’t even been six months since the inauguration and here we are.
Americans as a whole are growing increasingly disenchanted too, as Trump’s approval ratings dip into the low 30s.
None of this is meant to count Trump out. He’s a fighter and will continue to be boisterous and proclaim himself the greatest president of all time. He has a core group of supporters that will never leave him, even if, as he admitted, he shot someone in the middle of the street. He’ll have people like Sen. “Little” Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) — who are so desperate for the executive office’s warmth and a national spotlight that they’ll have dinner with Trump days before congressional hearings — do his occasional bidding for him.
But all of this is problematic since he doesn’t have many natural allies in Washington. As Axios reported, one GOP sage said:
No one really knows Trump and came to D.C. with him. He is a president on an island, all alone. … [T]he ability to get anything done is in double jeopardy.”
Reports out of Washington have indicated for months how lonely Trump truly is in the White House. Somehow, Trump’s circle continues to shrink. He apparently hates his whole staff and now he’s not even bothering to send anyone to publicly defend him. Despite his claims of fake news, Trump knows there’s tremendous value to having surrogates on cable news shows.
Where this ends up remains to be seen, but the underlying forces that caused Trump’s current state of isolation aren’t going away any time soon.
144 days in, 1318 to go
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