'Trump’s kingmaking skills are slipping' as he struggles to remain relevant: columnist

In a column for the New Republic, political commentator Alex Shepard suggested that, despite Donald Trump's claims that GOP candidates he has endorsed are doing extraordinarily well, there is less to it than meets the eye and that he may not be the political powerhouse he wants people to believe he is.

As Shepard notes, Trump's statement after the recent Texas primary where he claimed "All 33 Trump-Endorsed candidates won last night in Texas, or are substantially leading. Big night! How will the Fake News make it look bad?” was putting a positive spin on a claim that doesn't hold up when looked at in detail.

As he wrote, "Trump was, true to form, overstating his success—most of the candidates he had endorsed were running unopposed," adding that Trump has a history of painting a rosy portrait of his political successes.

"There was a familiar narcissism in Trump’s endorsement talk. Success in politics is often difficult to compute and Trump was a persistent failure in one key metric: His approval rating was often in record-low territory. That many Republicans sought his endorsement, along with his ability to deliver, demonstrated that was still a winner, even if the majority of the country didn’t think so," Shepard wrote. "But while Trump’s capacity for braggadocio remains bottomless, there are signs that Trump’s kingmaking skills are slipping—and that perhaps, his hold on the Republican Party isn’t as firm as it once was."

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Case in point, he notes, was Trump's endorsement of Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton -- who is stuck in a run-off with George P. Bush -- and the floundering campaign of Trump endorsee Rep. Ted Budd (R) for an open U.S. Senate seat in North Carolina.

Writing, "Part of the problem is that Trump is, in many cases, directly challenging incumbents whom he believes have crossed him," Shepard added, "The fact that Trump no longer has a Twitter account and thus has to constantly intervene in these contests to demonstrate his relevance is another factor."

"He has, in recent days, struggled to receive any attention at all—an unhinged three-page single-spaced letter to NBC’s Lester Holt barely registered in the media. He retains a profound hold on a sizable portion of the electorate but as the primaries near, he has nothing close to the megaphone he had before the January 6 riot at the Capitol," he continued. "Make no mistake: It’s still Trump’s party. Should he win the nomination in two years, he will use his perch to bend it to his will at every opportunity. But his early mixed endorsement record shows that his efforts to remake it entirely in his image are faltering. The Republican Party may still be rotten to its core, but it doesn’t belong entirely to Donald Trump."

You can read more here.