'Angry' Trump is headed for defeat and can't afford to lose more GOP support: columnist

In his column for Bloomberg, longtime political observer Jonathan Bernstein stated that Donald Trump is on the road to defeat in November as he watches members of his own party -- as well as military leaders -- turn on him at the same time recent polls show him falling behind former Vice President Joe Biden who is expected to be the Democratic nominee.

According to the columnist, a collection of "little things" related to the president paint a portrait of a man who is "angry, adrift and headed toward defeat."

For one thing, Bernstein wrote, the president bungled responding to a report that he was whisked off to a secure bunker under the White House on the advice of the Secret Service, making it a bigger story than it should have been. 

"Seems to me he had several options," he explained, "Defy the Secret Service, stay put and then have it leaked out that he heroically stood his ground. Go down to the bunker, and then when the press reports it just ignore the whole thing. Go down to the bunker, and then use the incident to bash the protesters (whom the president is portraying as violent). Or go down the bunker, make up something about doing an “inspection,” fight it out with the media for a week and then be completely embarrassed when your attorney general lets out the truth."

Complicating matters for the president is his collapse in the polls and his response calling them into question -- which only called attention to how badly he's doing, Bernstein suggested.

"Trump’s had a lousy run of polls, capped off by a CNN survey released Monday showing him down 14 percentage points to former Vice President Joe Biden. Options included highlighting the best poll out there, ignoring the polls and focusing on governing, or at least claiming to be ignoring the polls and focused on governing," he wrote before noting, " Instead, Trump had a pollster draft a risible memo accusing the other pollsters of being out to get him and tweeted it out, thus confirming reporting that he’s obsessed with the polls, implying that similar reporting about bad internal polls is true, and drawing attention to the worst of all the recent public surveys."

But worst of all, Bernstein wrote, is the fact that the president is losing support from Republicans who are no longer remaining silent.

"There’s also Trump’s continuing feud with Senator Mitt Romney, complete with more easily disproved statements. The president seems perfectly pleased to go forward without Romney or Senator Lisa Murkowski on his side. It’s worth remembering that Trump won narrowly in 2016, and can’t afford to lose any significant faction of Republicans," the columnist predicted.

Things are not likely to get better for Trump, he added.

"There’s also Trump’s decision to begin his rallies again, regardless of best practices to control the coronavirus. Will it help him? He’s been holding those rallies since early in his presidency and they don’t appear to have done him much good, but he likes doing them and has no one around him to tell him otherwise," Bernstein before concluding, "None of these items makes all that much difference on its own, but that’s a lot of missteps, easily exposed falsehoods and wasted effort, all from one day’s headlines. Have enough days like that and it adds up to a  weak, unpopular president who seems to be flailing like no one since Jimmy Carter. "

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