Last June, the popular UFC fighter Sean Strickland surprised onlookers when, immediately following a victory, he ducked into the audience and took a photo with a bystander: Donald Trump. “President Trump, you’re the man, bro,” Strickland declared in his post-match interview with Joe Rogan. “It is a damn travesty what they’re doing to you. I’ll be donating to you, my man. Let’s get it done.” Video of the moment rocketed across social media, serving as an early indicator of Trump’s enduring strength with his base, despite his recent felony convictions.

Strickland went viral last week for a very different reason: opposition to the president and his plan to take over Gaza. “Man if Trump keeps this bs up I’m about to start waving a Palestinian flag,” the fighter posted on X. “American cities are shitholes and you wanna go spend billions on this dumpster fire. Did we make a mistake?! This ain’t America first.” Strickland’s lament racked up 159,000 likes and 13.2 million views.

Strickland is far from the only one expressing buyer’s remorse. A month after Trump’s inauguration, the honeymoon is over; some of his backers are waking up next to the man they voted for and wondering if they’ve made a terrible mistake. With every policy he implements and offhand remark he makes, Trump is falsifying the imaginary versions of himself that inspired many of his supporters.

In late January, Tucker Carlson, arguably the most influential media personality on the American right, interviewed Curt Mills, the executive director of The American Conservative, a generally pro-Trump publication. Basking in the glow of the inauguration, the two men enthused over what they described as Trump’s commitment to a new policy of American restraint on the world stage. “It is an actual choice,” Mills said. “We cannot do the border if we do the Middle East.” Carlson quickly concurred: “We have to reorient toward our own interests.” Eleven days after this conversation aired, Trump announced his Gaz-a-Lago gambit. Shortly after, Mills published and promoted a piece declaring, “Trump’s Apparent Gaza Scheme Endangers His Entire Legacy.”

In February 2023, the Trump-curious journalist Glenn Greenwald claimed that “the energy behind opposing American interventionism … is actually much more on the populist right than the populist left.” In February 2025, he is now asking, “How does Trump’s intensifying fixation on ‘taking over Gaza’ promote an America First foreign policy?”

[Read: Nobody wants Gaz-a-Lago]

And the problem is not just the Middle East. Again and again, the fantasies that fueled Trump’s candidacy are colliding with the reality of his presidency, and the result is already dispelling the illusions of many who advocated for him.

“Elon Musk is a danger to Trumpism,” wrote the pro-worker, pro-Trump commentator Sohrab Ahmari earlier this month, calling on Trump to fire his billionaire sidekick and arguing that “it is becoming obvious that the oligarchs, and Musk especially, are taking advantage of justified public outrage against wokeness and DEI to ram through wide-ranging economic changes whose benefits beyond their own circles are questionable at best.” (Trump has not fired Musk.)

On Monday, Zachary Levi, one of the few Hollywood celebrities who openly endorsed Trump, went on Fox to plead for the “truly good, working people that work for the government that are getting lost in the cracks” amid Musk’s purge of the civil service. And after Trump’s administration banned the Associated Press from the White House briefing room for refusing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, the heterodox Spectator columnist Bridget Phetasy had enough. “I voted against compelled speech,” she wrote on X. “You can’t just rename a body of water and demand everyone go along with it and call us liars if we don’t. Nope. Miss me with that shit.” Her post garnered 10,000 likes and 1.4 million views.

Of course, Trump was never a free-speech, pro-labor, anti-war paragon in the first place. Over the course of his political and business careers, he’s lobbed lawsuits at multiple media companies, reportedly stiffed contractors and customers, pushed tax cuts skewed toward the wealthy, and continued American drone strikes and arms sales in the Middle East. But the outrage of some influencers who believed he’d further their causes is a warning: As president, Trump is no longer the vessel into which people can pour their discontent with the status quo. With every disappointment, it will become harder for him to hold together the coalition that delivered him the narrowest popular-vote victory since Richard Nixon’s in 1968.

Every candidate runs to some extent on the idea of their presidency rather than its reality, promising to be all things to as many people as possible. The brilliance of Barack Obama’s “Yes We Can” slogan in 2008 was that it allowed voters to fill in the blanks afterward with whatever they most desired. But because Trump appears to have few, if any, core principles beyond retaining and expanding his own power, he was able to take this approach to the extreme. Voters knew he believed in nothing, which meant he could conceivably do anything, making him the perfect candidate upon whom to pin their wildest dreams. And because Trump was out of office for four years, his supporters had the unusual opportunity to spin self-serving—and often mutually exclusive—narratives around the former president’s plans without the inconvenience of having to explain his actual policies.

With Trump in the White House again, however, many of these pleasing fictions stand exposed. The president’s hobbling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and National Labor Relations Board has upset the promoters of his domestic agenda in the intelligentsia, while his Gaza proposal has left many of his neo-isolationist boosters scrambling—or sidestepping the subject entirely. The reality of Trump’s presidency can no longer sustain the fantasies that were projected onto his campaign.

[Read: Trump doesn’t believe anything. That’s why he wins.]

Frankly, those who fell for these mirages should have known better. Trump is no conventional politician. He relies on instincts forged in the worlds of show business and real estate—an entirely transactional actor with an unparalleled penchant for self-promotion and flimflam. Attempts to fit him into a traditional ideological box will always fail, because he has never met a box he couldn’t sell for parts to the highest bidder. Attempts to cast him as a staunch proponent of American restraint or opponent of corporate greed do not reflect his pre-political career, never fit his first-term policies, and don’t describe his current ones. Rather, these bids to pigeonhole and appropriate Trump are best seen as efforts by intellectuals to impose order on what they don’t understand, or opportunistic attempts by ideologues to bootstrap their program to Trump’s ascendant brand.

There is a certain sadness to this state of affairs. Many voters were desperate for a straightforward alternative to what they saw as the stale establishmentarian liberalism of the Biden-Harris administration. So they projected its opposite, as they understood it, onto their only other viable option—and Trump, ever attuned to the needs of his audience, was more than happy to humor their hopes. But in actuality, the 2024 election was not a traditional binary choice between two coherently opposed political alternatives, the electoral equivalent of the Yankees versus the Red Sox. It was the Yankees versus a flaming tennis ball launched into orbit by a Tesla rocket—a choice not between two teams but between completely different sports. Many voters who thought they knew the rules to the game and that they would turn out the winners are now discovering that they didn’t and won’t.

This is why the more Trump’s presidency progresses, the more support he will lose. Back in November, Phetasy, the Spectator columnist, said that she was “voting for Donald Trump, but not really for Donald Trump—I’m voting against the left and many of the things that they stand for.” In 2024, Trump benefited from this dynamic. But come the 2026 midterms, he will have provided voters like her, who have been burned by their illusions, with something new to vote against. The problem with running as the candidate of people’s dreams is that, eventually, they wake up.

Can Jewish space lasers protect America? At first glance, President Donald Trump seems to think so. The 2024 Republican Party platform had just 20 planks, consisting of only 277 words. Twelve of those words were: “BUILD A GREAT IRON DOME MISSILE DEFENSE SHIELD OVER OUR ENTIRE COUNTRY.” Since taking office, Trump has moved to make good on that pledge. On January 27, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth promised swift action on the subject. That night, Trump signed an executive order titled “The Iron Dome for America,” turning the plan into policy.

In actuality, what Trump is proposing looks very little like Israel’s Iron Dome. His executive order calls for a space-based interception system to counter “ballistic, hypersonic, and cruise missiles.” Iron Dome is a land-based array that mostly targets unsophisticated short-range rockets and mortars fired by terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. Israel supplements this system with several other layers of missile defense, including David’s Sling and Arrow 3, which did most of the work repelling Iran’s aerial assaults on the country last April and October. Later this year, Israel is also expected to roll out Iron Beam, a laser-based system that can down projectiles for a fraction of the cost of Iron Dome’s interceptors—provided that it isn’t raining.

Many of these systems were developed with American partnership, and some could perhaps be adapted for deployment in the United States—although, as a land mass surrounded by oceans, the U.S. homeland has very different defense needs than the tiny Israeli state. But the point of Trump’s “Iron Dome for America” is not its feasibility. The system doesn’t have to work—or even exist—for it to serve the president’s interests.

[Read: The costly success of Israel’s iron dome]

A singular self-promoter, Trump excels at cutting through the cacophony of American politics with bold, blunt, and often cinematic images—such as “Iron Dome for America.” At a time when civil discourse is scattered across innumerable media platforms, attention is arguably a public figure’s most important resource, and Trump knows how to monopolize it. As when the president promised draconian tariffs against Mexico during his first weeks in office only to fold before they went into effect, he has figured out what our sclerotic political system actually rewards—brash bombast, not results—and governs accordingly, performing toughness rather than achieving outcomes.

This talent for theatricality is actually a big part of how Trump became president in the first place. In 2015, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas launched his own presidential bid as a harsh critic of illegal immigration, promising in a detailed 4,700-word policy platform to “secure the border once and for all.” Yet Cruz failed to gain traction, because he was bigfooted by a political outsider who had no policy experience but unmatched show business savvy. Trump promised to “build a wall and make Mexico pay for it” and rode that mantra to the presidency—after which the wall was never completed and Mexico did not pay for it.

Given Trump’s exceptional instinct for indelible images, that he landed on the Iron Dome as his latest gimmick is no surprise. For both Israel’s supporters and its detractors, the country’s missile-defense system emblemizes the technological frontier of warfare, thanks to countless photos and videos of its dramatic mid-air interceptions of enemy projectiles. As someone who made his name in real estate and television by manipulating people’s perceptions, Trump intuitively grasped the power of the Iron Dome in the popular imagination, and crudely co-opted it. Whether the system’s details make sense for America is not particularly important. For his purposes, the symbolism supercedes the substance.

Ronald Reagan, himself a former actor, also understood that a grand missile-defense project would appeal to the public consciousness. Critics derided Reagan’s plan as “Star Wars,” but its futuristic feel was precisely what made it so captivating, which is why the project consistently polled well, despite never coming to fruition.

Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative was a fanciful eccentricity in an otherwise robust governing agenda. But for Trump, flashy contrivances such as Iron Dome for America are the agenda. Unlike Reagan, who developed a broad political philosophy over his years in public life, Trump has few real principles and little interest in the nitty-gritty of legislation. He cares less about long-term outcomes than about being seen to be driving events. This is why he prefers to rule through grand pronouncements and executive actions, even though these are often ephemeral and can easily be tied up in litigation or overturned by a successor.

[Read: Trump doesn’t believe anything. That’s why he wins.]

Such indifference to end results might seem like a recipe for disappointing one’s supporters. But Trump is betting that in today’s chaotic information and political environment, appearing to care about issues that voters care about will be more important than actually delivering on them. And he has reason to be optimistic: Trump’s electoral coalition depends on people who don’t closely follow politics; many of them are less aware of the policies a politician implements than the image he projects. Trump, ever the performer, has mastered the art of marketing himself to the masses, and has used this skill to transform American politics.

In 2016, Cruz had a punctilious 25-point plan to curb illegal immigration; Trump had a sensational slogan about making Mexico pay for it—and trounced him. President Joe Biden’s economic policies delivered major gains for low-wage workers; Trump’s proposed tariffs are essentially a tax on those workers, but they voted for him over Biden, because Trump appeared to be vigorously fighting for them. Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency is a basket case run by people with little government experience, and is less likely than a commission staffed by experts to effectively curb federal spending without ugly unintended consequences. But DOGE is also a far more visible endeavor, fronted by Elon Musk, the world’s richest man. The Abraham Accords were mostly a symbolic handshake between Middle Eastern countries that had never fought a war against one another, but Trump’s branding and ceremony made the agreements into something more.

Again and again, Trump has managed to transmute political performance into the appearance of political achievement. Whether it’s promising a border wall or an Iron Dome, he may not be America’s most competent president, but he is its greatest showman, and in our broken political system, that might be enough to maintain his dominance over our collective attention and affairs of state.