As he rode down that escalator in June 2015, it felt like a lark, a curiosity, just another staged television spectacle. At most, many assumed that Donald J. Trump’s candidacy would be a sideshow, sure to be entertaining but hardly decisive.
Four years later, as President Trump kicks off his campaign for a second term on Tuesday with an eardrum-pounding, packed-to-the-rafters rally in Florida, no one doubts that he is the dominant force in the arena today, the one defining the national conversation as no president has done in generations. …
Yet Mr. Trump remains more vulnerable than many presidents heading into a re-election year. Even with a strong economy, he is the only president in the history of polling who has never once, not for a single day, earned the support of a majority of Americans surveyed by Gallup. His own internal polls this spring showed him losing badly in key states, prompting him to first deny their existence and later to fire some of his pollsters.
Mr. Trump has never expanded his support beyond the people who elected him — and never really tried. He has remained focused intently on retaining the support of his base to the exclusion of reaching out to those who have opposed him. Whether by inclination or calculation, it is a strategy for a divided era when Americans are less interested in getting along. CONT.
Peter Baker, New York Times