The president has opened fissures in his base by starting a war he couldn’t finish with Iran, stoking inflation and offending Christians. Barred from running again, he may feel he has nothing to lose
Lance Johnson voted for Donald Trump three times. Now he is feeling buyer’s remorse. “I haven’t been too happy with the third time around,” said the 47-year-old contractor, sitting at a bar in Crescent Springs, Kentucky. “We’re supposed to not start any new wars. Prices were supposed to come down. We were promised a lot of things and we’re not getting them.”
Johnson is not the only Trump voter having doubts about a US president who, after defying political gravity for a decade, finally seems to be crashing back to earth. The past two weeks have arguably been the most bruising of Trump’s two terms in office, suggesting that his tried and trusted playbook could finally be falling apart.
Having launched an unpopular war with Iran, the president was scrambling for a way out as fuel prices climb; he insulted the pope and posted an AI image of himself as Jesus Christ on social media; he lost in a court hearing over a lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal newspaper relating to the Jeffrey Epstein files; and his intervention on behalf of an autocratic ally in Hungary was rebuked by that country’s voters.
