President Donald Trump misunderstood what drove voters to reelect him as his MAGA base fractures, an analyst explained on Tuesday.
The Guardian's Moira Donegan described how Trump's most recent publicity stunt revealed how his "fixation on culture-war grievances is a colossal misreading of voters who just want prices to come down." In a recent moment at the White House, 58-year-old grandmother Sharon Simmons arrived to deliver McDonald's to the president. She's been working as a DoorDash app delivery driver to help pay for her husband's cancer treatment and the occasion was aimed to highlight Trump's agenda.
"The photo opp should have been a slam dunk for Trump: a simple way to promote one of his policies in the company of a sympathetic advocate and beneficiary," Donegan wrote. "But Trump, in characteristic fashion, could not resist the urge to insert a non sequitur about one of his own grievances: trans women athletes."
He asked Simmons if she thought men should play in women's sports, but instead she showed "considerably more message discipline than the president."
"I really don’t have an opinion on that," Simmons said. "I’m here about ‘no tax on tips.'"
Trump's supporters have questioned why he has focused on harsh immigration policies and alienated voters, instead of lowering costs for working Americans, Donegan explained. The Supreme Court has banned his tariffs and has signaled it will not side with his birthright citizenship case.
"It’s little wonder: a lame duck whose underlings are already openly vying to replace him and whose once lockstep Maga coalition is now fracturing under internal pressures, he hasn’t been able to get many of his much-touted policy proposals done," Donegan wrote.
By repeating errors of previous GOP presidents, he may have inadvertently opened a path for Democrats to retake Congress.
"And, now, he has made the exact same mistake as his Republican predecessors did – one for which he once lambasted them when he launched his own political career: he has begun a regime-change war in the Middle East that he has no chance of winning," Donegan wrote. "Now, ahead of November’s midterm congressional elections, Trump is increasingly unpopular, failing in his major policy initiatives and presiding over a fracturing coalition. The Democrats, ever eager to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, have yet to put forward a coherent agenda to counter him. But maybe they don’t need to. Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."