'Unforced errors': Conservatives flag what quickly killed Trump's 'honeymoon'

President Donald Trump's polling numbers are in freefall as voters broadly turn on his economic and immigration agenda — the two issues he has spent most of his political career riding to electoral victory. Speaking to The Washington Post, multiple conservative columnists gave their takes on what Trump is doing wrong.

National Review editor Ramesh Ponnuru, a frequent critic of the president, delivered a blunt assessment when asked whether Trump's polling drop was inevitable or if he blundered his way into it.

"It’s both," he said. "Presidential honeymoons always end. This one has ended quickly because of unforced errors on the president’s part. The polling suggests that the trade war is the principal cause of his decline. I also think Trump’s decline is the flip side of his extraordinary dominance of U.S. politics during the last few months: The country is thinking about him, not him vs. someone else, be it Joe Biden, Kamala Harris or Chuck Schumer."

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Another conservative columnist who focuses on legal analysis, Jason Willick, had a similar assessment.

"Trump is following the Biden model of over-reading his narrow mandate. Biden was elected to return politics to a steadier pace and instead pushed a highly progressive agenda. Trump was elected to control the border and inflation, and has instead launched a frenetic war with the courts and his political enemies," wrote Willick.

While voters still want to see a secure border, he continued, "I separate the immigration issue into two categories: first, the border, and second, the removals of people from the interior ... The exotic things Trump is doing to remove people from the interior — such as through the Alien Enemies Act and some detentions of university students — do not command majority support outside of the GOP."

"Keep in mind that public opinion on immigration has been highly reactive to circumstances: It moved left during Trump’s first presidency and then right during Biden’s," Ponnuru concurred. "That pliability suggests a basic ambivalence that the administration is ignoring. Its actions seem better designed to cause a backlash in public opinion than to achieve a lasting reduction in the illegal immigrant population."