Why Is Trump Causing His Own Downfall?

The White House seems to do everything possible to help the Republicans to lose their majorities in the midterm elections.

Trump’s tariff policies have guaranteed that prices for $3 Trillion in U.S. imports will rise by at least 10%. His energy policies have caused 6% price rises for electricity and gas.

His move against allies to grab Greenland is unpopular. Bombing Iran and abducting the President of Venezuela was not welcome.

Sending heavily armed Brownshirts into U.S. neighborhoods to apprehend or assassinate random people is likewise disliked.

Trump’s approval rating is sinking.

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One would assume that Trump would notice the upcoming ballot disaster and change course. But instead of calming the waves he is pouring oil onto fire:

President Donald Trump and his top lieutenants are doubling down on their hardline immigration policies and rhetoric following the shooting of a US citizen by a federal officer in Minneapolis — even as the incident has revealed cracks in the president’s coalition.

A phalanx of top Trump administration officials fanned out across Sunday morning news shows and social media to publicly defend the officer’s actions and the administration’s heavy-handed immigration enforcement tactics, all shifting blame to Democratic state and local officials.

Why is he insisting that his immigration police Brownshirts are in the right when everyone who sees the videos of their actions recognizes that their behavior is simply abhorrent?

His party is worried:

As midterms approach, GOP lawmakers, candidates, strategists and people close to the White House are warning that the administration’s mass deportations policy — and the wall-to-wall coverage of enforcement operations, arrests of U.S. citizens and clashes between protesters and federal officials — could cost them their razor-thin House majority.
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A new POLITICO poll underscores those worries: Nearly half of all Americans — 49 percent — say Trump’s mass deportation campaign is too aggressive, including 1 in 5 voters who backed the president in 2024. In a sign of growing discomfort among the president’s base, more than 1 in 3 Trump voters say that while they support the goals of his mass deportation campaign, they disapprove of the way he is implementing it.
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“ICE should focus on the bad hombres. The bad hombres, that’s it, not the cleaning ladies,” said Rep. Maria Salazar (R-Fla.). “One thing is the gardeners, another thing is the gangsters. One thing is the cooks, the other thing is the coyotes.”

During his first administration President Obama deported more people per day than Trump. But he did so without generating a huge public backlash.

Are Trump’s policies really more controversial than those of other presidents or is the amateurish implementation of policies by his administration the real problem?

Whatever it is – he will need to change it. Otherwise he will lose much of his power at the end of this year.

Reprinted with permission from Moon of Alabama.