US President Donald Trump wearing a Maga hat on February 28 at the White House. Photo / Jabin Botsford, The Washington Post
As Donald Trump ate his crab cake lunch inside the White House last month, conservative pollster Mark Mitchell tried to explain that there was a disconnect between what the Administration seemed to be focused on and what the United States President’s passionate base of supporters wanted to see.
“Sir, you got shot at the Butler rally,” Mitchell said, invoking the “really strong optics” of Trump raising his fist in defiance after the assassination attempt in Pennsylvania in July 2024.
“You said, ‘Fight, fight, fight.’ But nobody ever clarified what that means,” Mitchell continued.
“And right now, you’re fight-fight-fighting Marjorie Taylor Greene and not actually fight-fight-fighting for Americans.”
The head pollster at Rasmussen Reports warned Trump that many of his supporters believed that he hadn’t “drained the swamp” in Washington and suggested that the President refocus with a plan to embrace “pragmatic economic populism”.
“To the extent to which we were talking about the economic populism message, he wasn’t as interested as I would have hoped,” Mitchell said, adding that it was a “long-ranging conversation”.
Mitchell’s critique echoes a growing chorus of Maga faithful raising concerns over what they see as Trump’s second-term shortcomings.
In recent weeks, pockets of his base - known for its unwavering dedication to Trump and his Maga agenda - have accused him of focusing too much on foreign affairs, failing to address the cost-of-living issues he pledged to fix, aligning himself too closely with billionaires and tech moguls, and resisting the release of more investigative files on the deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.
Across the conservative spectrum, a steady drumbeat of commentators has warned that Trump’s coalition is weakened and that the party is headed for defeat in Midterm elections next November.
There are concerns that the base won’t show up over frustrations that Trump hasn’t pursued the Maga agenda aggressively enough.
And others worry that economic concerns could threaten his standing with independent voters, a key bloc in the Midterms.
Trump’s top advisers have taken note of the criticism from within Maga and see it as part of the “cyclical” feedback the Administration will receive throughout his term, as one senior White House official put it.
Trump’s staff members have planned for him to begin holding near-weekly rallies to tout his accomplishments after spending little time on the stump this year, two officials told the Washington Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity to detail internal conversations.
But on his first stop of that effort, at a casino in Pennsylvania last week, Trump again mocked the word “affordability” and played down concerns about rising costs and inflation before acknowledging, “I can’t say affordability is a hoax because I agree the prices were too high”.
His advisers expect that complaints from the base could become “louder” as the Midterms approach but will subside as more of his policies take effect.
Eventually, an adviser quipped, the cycle will restart with a new set of criticisms.
Chief among the recent critics has been Greene (Republican-Georgia), whose complaints led to Trump disavowing her last month. She subsequently decided to resign from Congress.
“I’m an early indicator - I’m like a bellwether,” said Greene, who stood by Trump during his political exile after the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol and has prided herself on being closely attuned to Trump’s base.
“I say it, and then within four to six months, everybody’s saying the same thing.”
In an interview with the Post, Greene said most of Trump’s longtime supporters still want to see him succeed, but “the base is jaded”. They know what they elected him to do, she said, and “they’re aware he’s not doing it”.
Public polling has shown mixed signals about how much Trump’s support has slipped among Republicans.
He maintains support from the vast majority of the party, though recent polling shows he has dipped below the usual 90% approval mark. His approval rating overall has lagged in recent weeks. It reached its worst with voters in late November and has ticked up slightly since, though it remains lower than at this point in his first term.
An Economist-YouGov poll conducted this month found that 41% of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing and 55% disapprove, a net improvement of five percentage points from a week earlier.
That apparent softness has coincided with some Republican pushback against aspects of the Trump agenda, including when GOP state senators in Indiana last week blocked a White House-led effort to redraw the state’s congressional maps.
And last Friday, 20 Republicans in Congress joined Democrats in another rebuke, supporting a Bill that would overturn Trump’s executive order limiting union rights for federal workers.
What remains to be seen is whether that brewing dissatisfaction will grow or whether Trump can more aggressively focus on issues that quiet the discontent. He said that his remaining three years in office amount to an “eternity” in “Trump time” to carry out his agenda.
Still, the chorus of supporters willing to speak out has become louder.
Mitchell was invited to the White House by Vice-President JD Vance, who follows him on X and has communicated with him about polling in recent months.
Before lunch with Trump, Mitchell met Vance, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Mitchell is not part of the President’s political operation, but Trump’s advisers were interested in hearing his outside perspective, a White House official told the Post.
Mitchell said in an interview that Trump listened to his concerns and asked questions but eventually pivoted to one of his favourite conversation topics: golf.
He gushed about two of his golf partners, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and Fox News host Bret Baier, both of whom are subjects of Maga-faction ire.
Trump also bragged about how much money he had raised during a golf fundraiser for Graham the weekend before, a day after he declared that he was rescinding his support for Greene.
Mitchell suggested that it would have been better for the Administration to acknowledge early on that repairing the economy would take significant changes and would not occur overnight.
“The very first thing they shouldn’t have done is lower gas prices one dollar and then say, ‘The Golden Age is here,’” he said.
Greene also believes that Trump is missing an opportunity to connect with his base on affordability.
People “understand that it takes time to stabilise the economy”, but they take issue with Trump’s claims that concerns about affordability are part of a “Democrat hoax”.
“No, it’s not, and the healthcare situation is serious. It’s dire, and Republicans are only just now taking it serious,” Greene said, referring to expiring healthcare subsidies that will cause insurance prices to surge for Americans enrolled in Affordable Care Act plans.
“This is a country driving 80 miles an hour at a brick wall on January 1,” when the subsidies expire.
Savanah Hernandez, a conservative commentator who serves as a Turning Point USA contributor, described the second Trump term so far as “underwhelming”, while crediting Trump with making positive, lasting changes to the conservative movement.
She was among the influencers the White House assembled for an “Antifa Roundtable” with Trump in October to discuss how to stop a loosely knit movement of far-left activists who have at times incited violence during protests.
But on that and a host of other issues Trump’s base cares about - including the Administration’s goal to deport more than one million undocumented immigrants this year, which it is not expected to reach; accountability for what it believes were government agencies being “weaponised against” conservatives; and vows to make life more affordable - Hernandez said he has fallen short.
“All we’ve really seen is punchy tweets, cool video edits, but really no follow-through on any of the promises,” she said of the messaging coming from the White House.
“And if he listened to his base and he was connected to us, even just through social media, you would see that the average person is still struggling to buy groceries, that the housing crisis is still on the mind of everybody, that inflation is still a really big issue, and when Americans see billions of dollars going overseas to any country, it really feels like a betrayal when we’re struggling here at home,” Hernandez said.
Two senior White House officials said Trump is shown a range of feedback from Maga commentators, including criticism about his performance, on nearly a daily basis.
In a statement, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called Trump the “proud founder and undisputed leader” of Maga, “the greatest political movement in American history”.
“President Trump is delivering on his core campaign promises across the board, keeping his word to the nearly 80 million patriots who elected him in a landslide, and fighting every day to make America greater than ever before,” she said.
Other Maga-aligned voices downplayed the extent to which criticism within the movement is a warning sign. Jack Posobiec, a longtime activist and conservative media figure, described Trump’s second-term performance as “light-years beyond” his first term.
“You will always have this sliver of people - it’s a very online group of people, a very active group of people, who would say they want more, they want more, they want more,” Posobiec said in an interview. “And I get that.”
Isabel Brown, another conservative podcaster, said the complaints from within Maga are “a signal of a healthy conservative debate.”
In Georgia, 36-year-old Jessie Meadows, a Trump voter who describes herself as Maga, grew frustrated this year as prices remained high and the President responded dismissively to the push to release more Epstein files.
Her disappointment hardened as Trump attacked Greene and Representative Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), who also pushed for the release of the files.
Trump’s posts touting favourable polls and success bringing down inflation seemed like his own version of “fake news”, Meadows said.
She voted for Democratic candidates in Public Service Commission elections in Georgia in November that flipped the seats from the GOP, and she said that going forward, she will back candidates she considers “America First”, regardless of party.
“If I had known what Trump was going to turn into now, I would have stayed home,” Meadows said.
Many supporters like her have been turned off by seeing what was once a full calendar of rallies in Middle America replaced with opulent events with business leaders, deal-signings with billionaires and travel abroad.
While meeting Trump, Mitchell told him that his base wanted to see him “smash the oligarchy, not be the oligarchy”.
“Building billionaire-funded ballrooms and jet-setting around the world and trillion-dollar investment deals looks a lot like oligarchy stuff,” Mitchell said.
Despite acknowledging Trump’s departures from his base on such issues as foreign and tech policy, some top populist voices in his movement insist he is course-correcting to win back support ahead of the Midterms.
Trump “is pivoting into a much harder populist nationalist stance - on deportations, drug cartels, Third World fraud, tariffs,” said Stephen Bannon, his former adviser turned influential talk show host.
“It’s only harder from here to November 2026,” Bannon, who has been outspoken against efforts by wealthy tech executives to influence Trump’s policies, told the Post.
“Broligarchs didn’t sign up for the ‘wetwork’ of modern politics. They will be the first off the bus.”
Maga influencers have cringed at some Trump comments they view as out of touch with his base, especially his assertion on Fox News that the US needs foreign workers because it does not have enough “talented people”.
Not long afterwards, Trump acknowledged that his base wasn’t happy with his decision to welcome foreign tech workers to the country but said his poll numbers would go up among “smart people”.
Raheem Kassam, a British right-wing political strategist living in Washington who is editor of the conservative National Pulse, said his phone lit up with complaints when Trump made the poll comment.
“I’m just saying, listen to the people that elected you, because right now, apart from the deportation stuff, you’re not really connecting with them,” Kassam said.
In response to a request for comment from the White House, in addition to Leavitt, Vance provided the Post with a statement touting a reduction in the number of illegal immigrants in the country and Trump’s work with pharmaceutical companies to lower drug prices for some Americans, among other accomplishments.
“Is there more work to do? Of course there is,” Vance said. “And no one is more committed to doing it than the President of the United States and his team.”
Other Trump supporters said that although not everything has panned out as they hoped, they remained confident about the President.
“He is not a king,” said Jerry Ramsey, 81, from Marietta, Georgia.
“He can’t just say, ‘You got to cut the price of a hamburger.’ Within another year, I think things will be rocking on pretty good.”
Sign up to Herald Premium Editor’s Picks, delivered straight to your inbox every Friday. Editor-in-Chief Murray Kirkness picks the week’s best features, interviews and investigations. Sign up for Herald Premium here.