In a move that should surprise nobody Donald Trump is conducting his presidency thus far in much the same way as he conducted his campaign. Late night tweet battles with celebrities, knee-jerk pronouncements, chaotic and dysfunctional organization and recourse to the Orwellian doublespeak of ‘alternative facts’. The news has been dominated by his controversial executive order banning migration from certain countries to the United States. The familiar strategy of staking out a radical and non-specific position, moderating slightly, splitting the difference and claiming victory is plain to see. This is what we bought, people. Its how he operates.

I say split the difference because while this is policy wildly outside of established norms it isn’t actually what he promised. I’m somewhat torn about the legitimacy of describing this as a ‘Muslim ban’, as many are doing.  He has repeatedly stated a ban on Muslim migration, imposing a religious test for immigrants. The order, on the other hand, applies only to certain states rather than all Muslims or even all Muslim majority countries.  Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen are all covered under the three month ban. But migration from many of the largest Muslim majority states will not be effected at all, for example Bangladesh, Indonesia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. This last one seems a particularly odd omission considering how many of the September 11 perpetrators were Saudi nationals. So for those reasons I’m reluctant to describe it as a ‘Muslim Ban’.

On the other hand, there are no non-Muslim majority countries on that list. I find it hard to believe that is a coincidence. It would also seem highly likely given what he has said previously that the end goal of the policy is to prejudice the migration of Muslims to the United States. The total halt to resettlement of Syrian refugees, for example, seems clearly to be a case of prejudice against a particular group. So perhaps it would be most accurate to say it is a ban directed against Muslims rather than a ban on them.

In any case, it has not worked out terribly well. The order was shoddily crafted, leaving it very unclear what if any exemptions existed or how this order interacted with established law. The execution was botched, with key National Security and Immigration officials only finding out about it when they saw it on the news. That isn’t how you are meant to do business.And what is more troubling it seems plausible that it isn’t even constitutional.

The acting Attorney General was fired after stating her opinion that it was not legal and therefore would not be defended in court by the Justice Department. This is fairly unprecedented. If nothing else the country’s chief legal officer saying your orders are illegal is a pretty bad look. The court has currently put a hold on the order while the legality is adjudicated, but much damage has already been done. Green-card holders and people with valid visas returning or coming to the United states were turned back, and tens of thousands now are either stranded overseas or unable to leave for fear of being stranded.

The moral aspect of this whole thing is well documented elsewhere. Sufficed to say I think it is deeply antithetical to the values upon which the United States was founded, and which it has defended and propagated throughout the world. But what about the politics?

There is a school of thought that Trump is immune from scandal. Fundamentally it holds that the people who vote for him don’t trust or watch mainstream media,  that the media they do watch will give them a favorable view of Trump and that therefore negative things about him will either not be heard or not be believed. I have two problems with this analysis.

The first problem is that it presupposes that the far-right or at least the right wing ecosystem of blogs, podcasts, radio shows and interest groups will always be on his side, that they will never turn on him over issues and give him negative press. This seems unlikely considering how easy it is to get on the bad side of the Conservative movement these days. Its almost at the stage that unless you are in favor of an assault rifle in every classroom, strip mining Yosemite a abolishing social security you are the enemy.  For years now being the most conservative guy in the room has been synonymous with being the most angry, the loudest and the least willing to compromise. So either Trump channels that guy (which is hard to do in practice, as facts get in the way) or daylight appears between him and the archetypal Jane Q. Teaparty. And once that happens, he will be in serious trouble. Because the beast must be fed. It can subsist only on anger, resentment and an endless siege mentality. Someone has to play the Judas to their Messiah, and there are no Democrats left to blame.

The second problem is that the hard right are not the people who won him the election. They are not numerous enough, for a start. Trump was elected with about 46% of the vote. There is not a lot of margin for error there, its a very small starting pool of support. And it gets smaller when you consider the 8% of people who had a negative view of Trump but voted for him anyway. Those people are not rusted on supporters impervious to dissuasion. And without them, the math becomes unworkable. The crucial voters who swung the contest to Trump were in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Most of the time they were people who had voted for Obama in the previous two cycles. These are not the people reading Breitbart and listening to Alex Jones. And polling would indicate most of them didn’t vote for Donald Trump because they wanted him to get rid of all the brown people.

They voted for him because they want jobs. If he is seen to be tilting at racist windmills instead of trying to get another shift put on at the local steelworks that could easily sway some voters. And he has so few to lose. The question is, can he reach such a level of unpopularity that Republican lawmakers break with him on key issues, or perhaps even treat him like a lame-duck?

The migration ban executive order won’t do it. But if this is the honeymoon I would be very cautious about predictions of a long and happy marriage.