President Donald Trump's recent slights against Catholics seem to be taking their toll on his support, MS NOW's Erielle Reshef said on Tuesday — and it's just part and parcel of a broader collapse of his coalition.
Reshef opened with a clip of a Catholic voter telling a reporter Trump's recent behavior is "Blasphemy. Just straight-up blasphemy. And he's going to pay for it. One day. Like all of us, he's going to have to stand before the Father and he's going to answer for all this."
"They're not happy," said Reshef. "President Trump's supporters and critics alike are reacting to President Trump's AI-generated post depicting himself as a Jesus-like figure. They're also not thrilled with him for calling Pope Leo XIV 'weak and captive to the radical left.' A moment ago, he told one of Italy's most important and widely-read newspapers that the pope shouldn't be talking about war at all because he has, quote, 'no idea what is actually happening.'"
"These head-scratching attacks, frankly, are the latest in a series, as The New York Times puts it, of 'disjointed, hard-to-follow and sometimes-profane statements,'" said Reshef, which now has Christian voters, and Catholic voters specifically, souring on him. "To be specific, that's a bloc ... that helped put him back in the White House. A reminder, Catholics are America's largest swing religious vote. Some, including the chair of the Catholic Studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, are warning Axios that they're already, quote, 'seeing attrition among white Catholics, not just Latinos,' as many view Trump's broadside as an attack on their religion."
"Add this to the troubling data that shows Trump hemorrhaging support from key voting blocs that were central to his election," she continued. "Take, for instance, Hispanic voters. They were 65 percent, they disapprove of the president. Right now, young voters, where more than two-thirds of voters between 18 and 34 have expressed disapproval now. And also in a stunning CBS/YouGov poll, white voters without a college degree, the backbone of his movement, of course, who have swung from overwhelmingly approving of President Trump early in his term, to a majority disapproving, a 40-point collapse in his approval rating within this group."
All of this, she added, "has some justopenly wondering: why provokethe coalition of voters whoactually helped deliver theWhite House, especially as wehead into the midterms?"