President Donald Trump's desperate attempt to engage his MAGA base with a terrible rehash of a previously unpopular move provoked a strange theory from a prominent political analyst Friday morning.
Trump's executive order renaming Lake Ontario as Lake America will underline to conservative voters his obsession with trivialities and remind them of one the most unpopular moves he made at the beginning of his second term, CNN's Aaron Blake argued.
"The move recalls one of Trump’s splashiest (so to speak) moves on his first day back in office last year, when he signed an order renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the 'Gulf of America,'" wrote Blake. "That went over like a lead balloon."
Polls show Trump's decision to rename the Gulf was more unpopular than his pardons of Jan. 6 defendants with 70 percent of Americans opposing it in multiple polls.
Blake noted those polls were taken before Trump's renaming spree.
"Americans have taken a pretty dim view of Trump’s penchant for renaming things — including after himself," he wrote. After his handpicked board of loyalists tried to rename the Kennedy Center after Trump, Americans said by a 2-to-1 margin that he had 'gone too far.'"
Trump faces shorter odds of winning approval for "Lake America" considering the current political context — prices are rising as his war with Iran wages on, Blake argued.
Also — Americans like Canada, he wrote.
"These kinds of stunts might have felt a little cuter when Trump was riding higher early in his term, they now risk reinforcing how preoccupied he is with not just trifles, but things that Americans decidedly do not want," he wrote.
"Even some Republicans are balking, with the GOP nominee for Wisconsin governor, Rep. Tom Tiffany, saying Thursday that the name should stay the same."
So why did Trump decide to escalate hostilities with Canada? Blake has a surprising theory.
"You could say he’s playing the hits. But it’s really playing the flops," wrote Blake. "It increasingly feels as though President Donald Trump is trying to do unpopular things."