Donald Trump’s jaded base is hanging on by a thread

| 7:49 pm EDT August 30, 2017
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Over the course of Donald Trump’s catastrophically failed seven months in office, approval rating polls suggest that he’s lost around one-fifth of the people who supported him when he first took office (from around 45% to around 35%). That’s an alarming rate of loss. It’s also led to the question of what’s wrong with the other four-fifth of his supporters, and when they’ll give up the ghost. To understand that answer, you have to look at it from the other side.

Many of you reading this voted for Hillary Clinton. So let’s hypothetically say that she took office, and then she turned out to be a disaster. Every presidency ends up being compromised on some level. But let’s say Hillary got into the White House and lost her mind and started acting like Trump, tweeting toxic garbage and demonstrating no understanding of the importance of the office. Let’s say it turned out that Hillary had conspired with Russia to rig the election in her favor. Let’s say that seven months into it, Hillary was such an erratic failure that even though she had a majority in Congress, she still hadn’t managed to pass a single piece of the agenda that she promised and you voted for.

Of course none of the above would have happened. Any thinking person who paid attention to the election knew that Donald Trump was going to be this kind of disaster if he won. And anyone who’s studied Hillary Clinton’s thirty years in public life knows that she’d have been a steady and capable leader. But let’s say Hillary was this much of a disaster. Even if you’d voted for her, you’d know by now that the gig was up. But would you be able to admit it to yourself? Even if so, would you be willing to say it to a pollster who came calling?

So even as roughly thirty-five percent of Americans are still telling approval rating pollsters that they support Donald Trump, many of them have already privately given up on him. They know he’s a failure. Whatever con job they thought they were voting for, this isn’t it, and many of them know it by now. They’re just not ready to say it out loud to a pollster. But the key detail here is that around one-fifth of his supporters from January already have publicly given up on him. More will continue to do so. His approval rating hasn’t yet come close to hitting its bottom.