President Trump took time out of his summer holiday to fire off a volley of early-morning tweets, pushing back against opinion polls that suggest support is waning among his most ardent fans.
A record stock market, jobs growth, tougher border security and "the Fake News Russian collusion story" had bound his supporters closer together, he argued.
“The Trump base is far bigger & stronger than ever before,” he said, adding that surveys suggesting otherwise were “phony”.
Hours earlier, however, one of his closest aides, Kellyanne Conway, had conceded that Mr Trump’s approval rating had slipped among “Republicans, conservatives and Trump voters … It needs to go up.”
Mr Trump once said that he could gun people down in the middle of New York and retain his popularity. During the US election he survived a series of scandals that would typically have wrecked a campaign.
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Even so, the latest survey results will have made for bracing reading inside the West Wing. A Quinnipiac University survey published last week showed that only 33 per cent of voters approved of the job Mr Trump was doing, a new low.
White voters with no college degree, a key part of his base, disapproved by 50 per cent to 43 per cent. In June, 53 per cent of this group had approved of the president, according to Quinnipiac. In the election 65 per cent of them voted for him.
There have been hints of alarm at the White House. A recent ban on transgender troops serving in the military was widely interpreted as an effort to motivate Mr Trump’s base, as was the unveiling last week of a proposal to slash the number of legal immigrants allowed into the US and to prioritise those who speak English.
At the weekend John McCain, the Arizona senator, suggested that prominent Republicans were manoeuvring for presidential runs in 2020 because “they see weakness in this president”.
His low popularity may have handicapped Mr Trump in his failed effort to persuade Republican senators to back healthcare reform.
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In the Quinnipiac poll, voters said that they were embarrassed rather than proud to have him as president by 54 per cent to 26 per cent. The number of voters who said that they “strongly approve” of Mr Trump had fallen to 23 per cent, down from 28 per cent a month earlier.
Other pollsters have reported similar declines, although a clear majority of Republicans still back the president. Nate Silver, the polling guru, observed months ago that the numbers of voters who approved of Mr Trump strongly was slipping, suggesting an eroding base.
Mr Trump arrived at his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, on Friday. He plans to take a 17-day “working vacation” while the air-conditioning system of the White House is replaced.
His early morning tweets also included an attack on Richard Blumenthal, a Democratic senator who apologised in 2010 when his claims of having fought in Vietnam were exposed as untrue.
Mr Trump tweeted angrily this morning shortly after Mr Blumenthal appeared on TV to talk about an investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia, calling him “a phony Vietnam con artist!”
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At the weekend it had been reported that Mr Trump was trying to regulate his Twitter use by running certain tweets past John Kelly, the new White House chief of staff.