President Trump took a break from his summer holiday to insult a Democrat senator, attack the “fake news” media and take issue with opinion polls that suggest support among even his most ardent fans is waning.
He woke early yesterday at the Trump-branded golf resort in New Jersey where he plans to spend much of August. “The Trump base is far bigger & stronger than ever before,” he tweeted just after dawn.
A booming stock market, growing employment, tougher border security and “the fake news Russian collusion story” had brought his supporters closer together, Mr Trump argued.
The plethora of surveys suggesting otherwise, he added, were “phony”.
The defiant tweets were vintage Trump — and the display seemed to shoot down the idea that his new chief of staff, John Kelly, who was with the president yesterday, will be able to moderate his use of social media.
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Mr Trump has survived scandals that would have destroyed another politician. Even so, the latest opinion polls will have made for uncomfortable reading inside the West Wing.
A Quinnipiac University survey published last Wednesday showed that only 33 per cent of voters approve of the job Mr Trump is doing, a new low. White voters with no college degree, a key part of his base, disapprove by 50 per cent to 43 per cent.
In June 53 per cent of these voters had approved of the president. In the election about 65 per cent of that group voted for him.
There have been hints that the White House is alarmed. Over the weekend one of his closest aides, Kellyanne Conway, conceded that Mr Trump’s popularity had slipped among “Republicans, conservatives and Trump voters . . . It needs to go up.”
A recent ban on transgender troops was widely seen as an effort to energise Mr Trump’s base, as was last week’s proposal to slash the number of legal immigrants allowed into the US and to prioritise those who speak English.
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Over the weekend John McCain, the Arizona senator, suggested that prominent Republicans were preparing to run for the White House in 2020 because “they see weakness in this president”.
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.
Other pollsters have reported similar declines. Nate Silver, a pundit, observed months ago that the number of voters who strongly approved of Mr Trump was slipping, suggesting an eroding base, although a large majority of Republicans still back him.
Mr Trump’s tweets also included a series of attacks on Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat senator whose claims of having fought in Vietnam were exposed as false in 2010. Mr Trump alleged that Mr Blumenthal had “cried like a baby and begged for forgiveness like a child” when he was found out. The attack appeared to have been triggered by Mr Blumenthal appearing on TV to comment on the investigation into whether Mr Trump colluded with the Kremlin.
The president arrived at his golf resort in Bedminster on Friday. He plans to take a 17-day “working vacation” while the air-conditioning system of the White House is replaced.
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It also emerged that Beijing expects Mr Trump to visit before the end of the year. Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, said that he hoped the trip would help to push relations with America forward. The president may visit China before he comes to Britain.