The list of prominent people who have publicly defied President Trump — including onetime allies — keeps growing. Consider what has happened in just the past few weeks:
Senate Republicans over the weekend refused to support Trump’s firing of a federal prosecutor who had investigated two of the president’s personal lawyers. As a result, the prosecutor’s deputy, rather than the administration’s choice, replaced him.
A federal judge on Saturday rejected Trump’s request to block the release of a book critical of him.
The author of that book — John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser — said in an interview with ABC News on Sunday that Trump posed a “danger for the republic.”
Another former administration official — Jim Mattis, a retired Marine general who served as defense secretary — said Trump was trying to divide the country and “make a mockery of our Constitution.”
Trump’s top military adviser, Gen. Mark Milley, publicly apologized for participating in a photo op with him that followed the use of tear gas against peaceful protesters.
The Supreme Court blocked Trump’s effort to end a signature Obama administration immigration policy. (And, yes, the court is influenced by public opinion, as The Times’s Adam Liptak has explained.)
Several Trump-friendly commentators — at The Wall Street Journal, Breitbart and elsewhere — have said his responses to the coronavirus and police violence are hurting his chances of re-election.
The commissioner of the N.F.L. switched his position on player protests about racial injustice, which angered Trump.
These acts of defiance are both a sign of Trump’s current weakness and a further cause of it, as Matt Glassman, a Georgetown University political scientist, told me. People feel more comfortable opposing Trump because they think he is on the wrong side of public opinion on several major issues.
And the more people who defy Trump, the less difficult it becomes for others to do so. It was especially striking to see Senator Lindsey Graham, a frequent Trump defender, decline to support the Trump administration’s choice of a new federal prosecutor. “It’s not a random, rogue action,” Glassman said. “It’s a calculated move based on the weakness of the president.”
None of this means Trump is doomed to lose in November. Past presidential candidates, like George H.W. Bush and Harry Truman, overcame polling deficits bigger than the one Trump currently has against Joe Biden. But sustained weakness is very dangerous for a politician.
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