MSNBC's John Heilemann warned that President Donald Trump was making the same mistake that caused him to lose support during his first term for one of his strongest campaign issues.
The president is bleeding support for his handling of immigration 100 days into his second term, with 46 percent of adults in one poll saying they approve while 53 percent disapprove, a three-point swing in each direction since last month. Heilemann said that horrific stories about individual families were once again dragging Trump down.
"Immigration is the strongest issue they have and he is, across all of that polling, his numbers on immigration aren't great," Heileman said, "and I think you got to think back to the first term, when immigration was an important reason why he won the first term, often overlooked by people in analyzing the 2016 race, and what happened was he lost the plot with family separation.
"The family separation policy was when people started to put a human face to the cruelty of that policy, and he lost a lot of support on immigration around that issue, and I think it was predictable that if he tried to do an immigration policy that was as draconian as he promised, that the same phenomenon would happen."
Individual cases are breaking through, such as the administration's refusal to return Kilmar Abergo Garcia, a legal U.S. resident who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador, and Heilemann said others are beginning to drag down Trump's support on the issue.
"They are dragging his numbers down on an issue where, in general, he has a lot of support among the American people, and, in general, it's always been one of his strongest issues," Heilemann said. "They are just comprehensively, politically speaking, a huge amount of trouble with the American people right now."
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