Getty Images 1600 Penn What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted Trump Fans? It’s the biggest question in American politics: When the president inevitably fails to keep his promises, where do his voters go?

Jeff Greenfield is a five-time Emmy-winning network television analyst and author.

Politics, as the late Bart Giamatti once said of baseball, “is designed to break your heart.” Sooner or later, everyone elected to the highest office in the land will act in a way that crushes the truest of believers, who were convinced that this time they had found a leader impervious to the powerful currents of compromise, strong enough not to abandon core principles.

This is why it’s hard not to feel a pang of sympathy for those who believed that Donald Trump’s years of opposition to foreign entanglements would actually lead to the reversal of decades of often disastrous interventions in every corner of the world. On Monday night, they heard him wrap the betrayal of their fondest hopes in the very rhetoric that had convinced them he would take their side.


Once Trump had finished his effort to clean up the wreckage of his Charlottesville comments (“When we open our hearts to patriotism, there is no room for prejudice, no place for bigotry and no tolerance for hate”), he presented his all-new, completely improved, more-or-less-indistinguishable-from-the-previous-administration’s-policy wrapped up in words that implied a sharp break from his predecessors.

"We are not nation-building; we are killing terrorists,” he said. “We have been paying Pakistan billions and billions of dollars, at the same time they are housing the very terrorists that we are fighting … India makes billions of dollars in trade with the United States, and we want them to help us more with Afghanistan, especially in the area of economic assistance and development.” In these and other words, Trump was offering a watered-down version of the much more blunt “America First” language of his inaugural address, when he said, “We’ve subsidized the armies of other countries while allowing for the very sad depletion of our military; we’ve defended other nation’s borders while refusing to defend our own.”

The policy, however, brought to mind a line from The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again”: “Meet the new boss; same as the old boss.” A few thousand more Americans put in harm’s way; a stern warning to Pakistan to curb its support for Al Qaeda; the same stern warning to Afghanistan to root out government corruption in a land where corruption is and has been the driving force for generations, the repeated promise that “we will win” with no real definition of what winning would mean.

And Trump’s one-time true believers weren’t buying what the president was selling.

Breitbart News, now commanded once again by the banished White House strategist Steve Bannon, was filled with harsh responses.

“[Trump] Defends Flip-Flop,” one headline said. “His McMaster’s Voice,” read another, referring to Trump’s national security adviser, a Bannon foe. “President H.R. McMaster’s Yuge Foreign Policy Blunder,” read another. And, in the unkindest cut of all, “Trump Echoes Obama’s Blank Check Rhetoric,” complete with a photo of Trump and Obama together.

Breitbart was not alone. Mike Cernovich, an "alt-right" blogger and conspiracy theorist whose tweets and posts have been unstintingly supportive of Trump, asked simply, “Why did we even have an election?” The pro-Trump radio host Laura Ingraham asked: “Who’s going to pay for it? What is our measure of success? We didn’t win with 100K troops. How will we win with 4,000 more?” Ann Coulter, who may be regretting the title of her recently published book (“In Trump We Trust”) tweeted: “It doesn’t matter who you vote for. The military-industrial complex wins. Only difference: GOP presidents pronounce ‘Pakistan’ correctly.”

The unanswered question is: What becomes of the broken-hearted? Will they forgive Trump’s reversal on Afghanistan—a change of mind he actually acknowledged, for what may be the first time ever—if he doubles down on his “nationalist” views of trade and immigration? Will they see him as yet another president captured by the conventional Washington wisdom, which can never seem to figure out a way of disentangling the nation from a foreign conflict? Will they subject his future decisions to a more skeptical inquiry? Will his decision further erode his standing among those who tell pollsters they “strongly approve” of his presidency?

Those who saw in Trump a figure who might actually break with the bipartisan consensus of the last half-century-plus had every reason for their optimism. His background, his ego, his very disconnection from any taint of insiderism gave them reason to think that he would actually do what he had said he would do. We don’t know how large this group is, but it contains some of the most fervent and committed Trump supporters. What they now do with their shattered hopes is going to make a very big difference in the coming political wars.