President Donald Trump “miscalculated” his level of support — especially on the issues that won him re-election in 2024, and it has “backfired,” according to an opinion columnist.

In “Why Trump is failing,” Steven Roberts in the Columbia Missourian writes: “Trump has called 2025 ‘the greatest first year’ of any president, but a majority of Americans strongly disagree.”

“To hardcore MAGA loyalists, the president can do no wrong. But rabid Red Hats account for only about 35% of Americans,” observes Roberts.

He identifies where the president is losing support: “since Trump received almost 50% of the popular vote, that means about 15% of his backers were not true believers, and they are the ones who are slipping away.”

Roberts identifies why.

“The single biggest reason Trump won a second term was economic discontent with the Biden administration, and it’s the single biggest reason so many voters are now disillusioned,” he says, pointing to a CNN poll that, he writes, finds “55% say Trump’s policies have actually made things worse and almost two-thirds say he has not done enough to reduce their cost of living.”

But Roberts offers more.

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He explains that Americans supported Trump’s policies on immigration when it was about immigrants at the border.

“They were ‘others’: easy to demonize and dehumanize. They had no voice and no identity, and Trump and his media managers could control what voters knew and felt about them.”

But, he continues, “Trump miscalculated, and his show backfired,” because his targets are no longer “faceless hordes but real people with jobs and families, friends and neighbors.”

The came the shooting of a Minneapolis mother of three, Renee Good.

“The administration tried to brand her as a domestic terrorist who had caused her own demise by driving at the agent. But the videos — seen by more than 80% of Americans — told a different story,” he writes. “Good simply did not look like a terrorist. Plus, independent news organizations analyzed the cellphone footage and concluded that it ‘contradicted’ the official line.”

Trump “lost control of the narrative, and public opinion turned against him.”

The president’s other miscalculation: his stance on the affordability issue, an issue that arguably got him re-elected.

With just 36 percent of Americans saying Trump has the right priorities, Roberts surmises that is simply his “loyal MAGA base.”

And he warns that if this trend continues, voters at the polls in November will “take it out on his party.”

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President Donald Trump on Thursday unleashed dozens of rapid-fire social media posts after what critics described as a difficult few days at Davos. His speech there reportedly further strained relations with U.S. allies, following his Greenland gambit, which produced few if any clear gains and drew criticism over its diplomatic costs. The rollout of Trump’s Board of Peace also struggled to gain traction, with a handful of European allies participating in the inaugural signing ceremony.

In spoke of the more recent posts, Trump went off on “Fake Polls,” while admitting that they have his approval rating “in the low 40s,” although The Economist shows his net approval rating currently at 37%.

“We have the Greatest Economy in the History of our Country, we have the Strongest Border in History, nobody has ever done a job like I have done, and they have me in the low 40s,” he complained. “The Democrats destroyed Healthcare, I’m trying to fix it, and they give me FAKE low numbers. Fake Polls on the Economy, on the Border, on just about everything, are ridiculous and dangerous. The REAL Polls have been GREAT, but they refuse to print them.

“The Times Siena Poll, which is always tremendously negative to me, especially just before the Election of 2024, where I won in a Landslide, will be added to my lawsuit against The Failing New York Times,” he wrote. “Our lawyers have demanded that they keep all Records, and how they ‘computed’ these fake results — Not just the fact that it was heavily skewed toward Democrats. They will be held fully responsible for all of their Radical Left lies and wrongdoing!”

READ MORE: Top Conservative Think Tank Roasted Over ‘Retrograde’ Marriage and Family Report

Some posts promoted questionable claims, including suggesting that annualized U.S. GDP grew to more than 5 percent — while most expectations and Congressional Budget Office predictions are currently about half that number.

He promoted a claim that he “helped create ‘The Martin Luther King Jr International Freedom Games’ in 1966,” when he would have been about 20 years old.

Other posts he promoted talked about the U.S. trade deficit, alleged illegal voting in the 2020 election, immigration, tariffs, globalism, Don Lemon, Supreme Court oral arguments for Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, and one declaring Trump the “greatest President in the world.”

Another post offered the transcript and video of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller allegedly claiming, and without evidence, that James Comey, Jim Clapper, John Brennan, Lisa Monaco, and President Barack Obama “all conspired and worked together to sabotage, undermine, unravel, and overthrow the United States government and the democratic institutions and structures of this country.”

That post, as Raw Story reported, appeared to be in response to former Special Counsel Jack Smith’s currently ongoing congressional public testimony.

Another post included video of Argentinian President Javier Milei attacking “wokeism” while praising the “Americas.”

READ MORE: These 19 Democrats May Already Be Jockeying for a Presidential Run: Report

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The top conservative think tank in the United States has released a new policy paper, “Saving America by Saving the Family,” that a New York Times columnist has panned.

Opinion writer Jessica Grose wrote that the Heritage Foundation authors went all the way back to 1776 for their “inspiration.” They are calling their report “A Foundation for the Next 250 Years.”

“In understanding their crowning achievement, Americans must recognize that the founding fathers were, quite literally, fathers,” the report stated. “Fifty-four of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence married and had a total of 337 children among them — an average of six each.”

She commented, “I wondered: Are they counting the six children Thomas Jefferson had with Sally Hemings — whom he enslaved and who could not legally refuse unwanted sex — or not? What kind of example is that supposed to set?”

Grose continued, explaining, “That’s just the opening salvo of this confused, retrograde report, which leaves out a lot of important details from its rose-colored history of marriage and family in the United States.”

She called the report “a curious set of guidelines for the future, since it seems mired in culture war battles from the 20th century, unable to face the past 60 years of change.”

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The Heritage Foundation is the right-wing think tank behind Project 2025, which, it could be argued, is focused on returning America to far more conservative and traditional social, cultural, and institutional beliefs.

Grose noted that Heritage “seems to want to take a time machine back to when women were financially dependent on men and gay marriage was not legal.”

She also noted the discrepancies in Heritage’s thesis.

“The report’s authors know they can’t tell all women to be stay-at-home mothers (returning the country to 1960s employment levels for women) because that would contradict their other goal, to dismantle the welfare state and put even more work conditions on parents receiving government aid,” she wrote, noting that “the bulk of the paper is about ways to whittle down government support for anybody who isn’t part of a traditional married family, ideally with a male breadwinner.”

Grose says that on the one hand, “I always marvel at how we agree on some of the problems American families face,” yet on the other, can “have completely different solutions.”

Other discrepancies Grose pointed to include a poll showing that young male Trump voters see having children as their top measure of success, and marriage as their fourth.

“Instead of looking at these stats and thinking that maybe there’s a deeper problem if only conservative men are bullish about having children,” she wrote, “the authors look at the stats and think: If our government only pushed religion and traditional marriage harder legally and culturally, everyone else would fall in line.”

READ MORE: ‘Damage Control’: Trump Mocked for New Weekly Barnstorming Blitz Months Ahead of Midterms

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