Hamza Adam 
President Donald Trump is facing plummeting support as he approaches his 100th day in office, but panelists on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” agreed it didn’t have to be that way.
The president is underwater in several new polls as voters turn against his trade wars and government cuts, and Politico’s politics bureau chief Jonathan Martin identified some of the choices Trump could have made early in his presidency to avoid drawing voters’ ire.
“These are self-inflicted wounds that Donald Trump has chosen,” Martin said. “To borrow an old phrase, they’re wars of choice. If he had not done DOGE and Elon Musk, and if he had not done ‘Liberation Day’ in a tariff regime, think about where his numbers would be today. Think about it.
“If he takes the oath on Jan. 20 and the first 100 days, he cracks down on illegal immigration, he does executive orders on ‘woke’ this, ‘woke’ that, and then, yeah, he brings in a series of CEOs every week to the Oval Office, some domestic, some from abroad, and just jawboning the economy and talks about the big, beautiful jobs he’s creating, he’d be over 50 [percent], at least at 50 [percent] today. It’s remarkable. This is at his own hand that he has done this to himself, not any external forces.”
Host Joe Scarborough agreed, saying he had wrecked the humming economy he had inherited from former President Joe Biden.
“Well, you know, I had said when he was getting sworn in, if he went golfing every day, if he, you know, did what Dwight Eisenhower made people think Ike did, you know, he’d be over 50 percent just riding the economy out,” Scarborough said. “He didn’t, he obviously didn’t do that.”
Also read: ‘This is our shot’: Dems believe MTG’s new job gives ‘golden opportunity’ to destroy GOP
Musk has done almost as much as Trump to drive down the president’s approval ratings through his deep cuts to government agencies that tossed thousands of federal workers out of a job, but the panelists agreed that was another choice he’d made to damage his own presidency.
“This was so predictable, right, that, like, yes, Americans generally agree with the idea of cutting waste, fraud and abuse,” said co-host Jonathan Lemire. “But the way that this was done and the sheer volume of cuts into programs that people really liked, that helped people, would lead to the backlash. We saw the anger at the town halls across the country, but it’s more than that. These polls here, we want to get your take. Trump is underwater on the issues that were supposed to be strengths, like, Americans don’t like how he’s going about some of the immigration and the deportations.”
“Due process, it turns out a popular thing for most Americans,” Lemire added, “and mostly it’s the economy where he inherited an economy by most metrics, going pretty well under president Biden, and it is a talk about self-inflicted wounds. This tariff fight has has rattled the markets, and if these are eventually implemented here in the weeks ahead, it’s going to raise prices, inflation for everyone, including his own voters.”
Watch the video below or at this link.
source https://www.rawstory.com/morning-joe-today-2671856364/