People have predicted Donald Trump's demise a million times and been wrong about it. I will now add my name to the list of fools willing to tread this territory. I'm not necessarily talking about an immediate ouster or even an erosion of the 35 percent of stooges who will never leave his side, but rather a hit in public confidence among the relatively sane people left in this country that ultimately proves unrecoverable for him.
Trump's downfall with voters will be the fact that he put America's national security at risk when he revealed intelligence from a key U.S. ally, Israel, to operatives of that country's sworn enemy, Russia.
The kicker is that the Comey memo detailing Trump's effort to end the FBI's investigation into Michael Flynn has simultaneously ignited a firestorm on Capitol Hill. Taken in tandem, Trump will lose the confidence of a solid majority of voters just as Democratic lawmakers stand to gain the ammunition they need to claim Trump either violated the law or, at the very least, breached every Beltway standard for politically acceptable behavior. This one-two punch could force Republicans to acquiesce to a special prosecutor or an independent commission or (gulp) even impeachment (though impeachment is probably a stretch for the GOP).
But it was Trumps' leak of Israeli intelligence to the Russians that will be his ultimate undoing with voters, which will put Republicans in a bind. In the past when people have predicted Trump crossed a line, it was always about him transgressing political norms. Like when he mocked Sen. John McCain for getting "captured" in Vietnam and pundits lined up to say Americans would never stand for him maligning a war hero. Yet Trump did survive—and was even celebrated for saying whatever he thought, political norms be damned.
But there's two instances in which most voters won't celebrate stupidity—when it affects their pocket books or their safety. I learned this from covering the LGBTQ movement for a decade-plus. One of the key turning points in public support for the movement was when stories hit that the military was expelling gay Arabic speaking linguists from units in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those stories, which surfaced several times between about 2002 and 2009, essentially went "viral" in today's terms. Americans started to think, "You know what, this policy doesn't make me or my loved one serving in Iraq any safer."
In 1993, when the "don't ask, don't tell" gay ban first passed, only 40 percent of Americans supported allowing gays to serve openly in the military. By 2004, 63 percent did, and that support steadily edged up throughout the early aughts until the military's gay ban was repealed in 2010 with about 70 percent support of the American public.
This is a long way of saying that the headlines now emerging about all the key U.S. allies withholding crucial intelligence from the U.S. based on Trump's fumble are a killer for His Orangeness. He just lost any voter who was giving him the benefit of the doubt out of deference for the office because he now poses a clear and present danger to American lives.
On May 15, Gallup had Trump at 57 percent disapproval, already historically high. Expect to see that rise several points at least. If his disapproval rating heads into the low- to mid-60s, he'll have essentially lost every voter who wasn't a diehard Trump supporter. And it won't be a temporary hit.
Voters don't forget when public officials put our national security at obvious and indisputable risk.