

Donald Trump with former Alaska governor Sarah Palin in 2010. (Craig Ruttle/AP)

It's almost as if the best way to make something popular is for President Trump to take the opposite position.

It has now been more than a week since Trump announced that he would ban transgender people from the military. And while we have yet to see any proposal — the Pentagon is saying it will continue to integrate transgender people in the meantime — a new poll shows Americans overwhelmingly oppose it. The Quinnipiac poll shows 68 percent saying transgender people should be allowed to serve in the military, compared with 27 percent who say they shouldn't.

There is no past polling on this issue, so there's not much of a before-and-after comparison. But it's worth noting that this is something at least some folks in the White House thought would be a difficult issue for Democrats to contend with; it turns out it's something on which Americans overwhelmingly side against Trump.

And in that distinction, it's got good company. If you look at the contentious things to which Trump has attached his political brand during his presidency, the other side is almost always significantly more popular. Josh Barro aptly called it Trump's “inverse Midas touch,” and it's something I've spotlighted before when it comes to Trump's immigration positions. It often goes for both issues and Trump's personal squabbles, and it's continued well into Trump's presidency.

A few examples:

There are some exceptions to the rule. People offered qualified support of Trump's limited airstrikes in Syria in most polls. They also tend to like the idea of huge infrastructure spending, which Trump has talked about but hasn't proposed any specifics on. They also like Trump's proposals to beef up the military.

But when it comes to basically anything else, a pattern is forming: Whether it's because people don't like Trump, he takes extreme positions, or he simply doesn't do a good job of selling his policies and ideas — or most likely some combination of all three — basically everything Trump is doing these days is broadly unpopular. And much of it is even splitting the GOP base.

We'll never know how the transgender military ban might have polled had Trump not taken the position he did — a position that was considered extreme even among Republicans in Washington, who were taken aback at how broad it was. But, as Barro noted, it stands to reason that he might have even made the idea of transgender service members more popular.