Tamara Keith:
Yes, I mean, certainly this is an uncomfortable moment for the president. This is his base expressing disappointment with him and the celebrities of his base expressing disappointment with him.
But you already see a little bit of a shift, a little bit of movement, some people not being as loudly upset about it as they were, say, on Friday. And so it will be interesting to watch whether the sort of the MAGA celebrities — whether the president is able to get the MAGA celebrities to sort of move in his direction and get the public, to get rank-and-file people to then move in that direction, or whether this feeling of betrayal persists and lasts beyond this.
Clearly, he put out that social media post. It was very long. And he was trying to — where earlier in the week, he said, we don’t have time for this, he once again was like, come on, please. His White House also was saying anybody who sort of gins this up is undermining the administration.
But the undermining was coming from within. It was coming from his supporters. It wasn’t the Democrats that were the problem this time. It wasn’t the other guys that he often demagogues. It was his own supporters who were expressing such disappointment.
That said, his own supporters, many of them initially expressed a lot of disappointment with the airstrikes in Iran, and then pretty quickly they got back in line. And so it will be interesting to watch what happens there, whether he’s able to get them back.
