'His biggest enemy': Analyst sees Trump falling into trap that dogged his last presidency

President Donald Trump is bleeding support from his own voters, Aaron Blake wrote in an analysis for The Washington Post Thursday — in a pattern very similar to how he sunk himself in his first term.

Republicans, wrote Blake, "appear to not want to just come out and say they hate his tariffs, for instance, but they kind of say it without saying it. And a growing volume of polls this week gets at clear and substantial unease on the right with what Trump is doing. The combined lesson seems to be that Trump supporters and conservatives hold out hope for Trump’s presidency, but those hopes are being tested by his policy decisions and chaotic methods."

A number of recent polls have suggested that Trump's economic decisions, particularly his trade war with Canada and Mexico, are landing with a thud even among some Trump supporters, and that tech billionaire Elon Musk's effort to dismantle federal agencies is a serious liability. But the hits just keep on coming, Blake continued.

"Most striking is a new Reuters-Ipsos poll that asked not just whether Republicans approved of Trump, his tariffs or his efforts to overhaul the federal government, but whether they think he’s been 'too erratic' in carrying out his economic agenda," wrote Blake. "About 3 in 10 Republicans agreed that Trump has been 'too erratic.' Just 6 in 10 dispute that ... And even the Republicans who disputed that didn’t protest too much. Just 3 in 10 “strongly” disagreed that Trump has been too erratic."

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What all of this reveals, he said, is something that was a big problem for him the last time he was elected: "Even voters who wanted to support what he was doing often took issue with his chaotic methods. Trump’s behavior and whims were often his biggest enemy. A 2017 CNBC survey asked people what they perceived as the main obstacle to Trump’s agenda. Far and away the top one was 'his erratic personal behavior,' at 39 percent." By 2020, former President Joe Biden campaigned on a platform of normalcy and stability, and voters leapt at it, with Biden taking nearly every battleground state.

The simple reality, Blake concluded, is that "it’s looking more and more like that kind of chaos isn’t what Americans — and even many Trump supporters — saw themselves as signing up for."