He talks tough, and tweets tougher. He makes demands on Congress and state governments, needles foreign nations and launches broad attacks on the press. But is anyone afraid of President Donald Trump?

The president wooed crowds and wowed political observers during his campaign, when the insults and veiled threats he lobbed against primary foes, journalists and protesters at his rallies turned out to be successful. Far from disqualifying him for the presidency, as Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton asserted, Trump's bombastic approach mirrored the anger of much of the American electorate, who sent him to the White House. But as a governing tool, Trump's tough-guy strategy is meeting with resistance, and not just the kind Democrats and their allies are organizing this summer. That, experts say, weakens the president both at home, where he is trying to achieve the first major legislative victory of his term, and abroad, where Trump is seeking to get allies to pay more for defense and foes, to back off their military postures.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, like Trump, lacked political experience, but "he knew how to compromise, negotiate with people. Trump has none of that capacity," says Mark Peterson, a UCLA political science and law professor who is an expert on the interaction among the president, Congress and interest groups.

"That's going to be a problem with Congress [and] the G-20," the group of world leaders Trump is meeting with in Germany this week. "Already our allies are feeling pretty uncomfortable about his positions and approaches," Peterson says.

Trump has badgered Congress to pass an unpopular health care bill. They've not done so, and a strategy in the Senate to advance a bill before the July 4 recess failed miserably, with Majority Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell being forced to pull the bill because of opposition from within his own party.

The president's voter fraud commission demanded that states turn over personal information on voters, including party ID and the last four digits of their Social Security numbers. States are rebelling, and not just the blue-tinted ones: so far, 44 states have refused to hand over all or some of the requested information.

He's lashed out at the inquiries into his team's alleged ties with Russia as a "witch hunt;" Congress is investigating anyway. And those accusations of "fake news" and personal attacks on MSNBC "Morning Joe" hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough? The two came back the next day to report on how the White House tried (unsuccessfully) to get Scarborough to plead with the president to kill a damaging National Enquirer story. And the cable network followed up with full- and half-page ads in The Washington Post lauding the high ratings of its shows, which Trump insists are "low-rated."

"Trump's orientation is to bully – 'I'm going to run somebody against you. I'm going to hurt you.' That's not where you lead from," says Texas A&M University political science professor George C. Edwards III, author of "On Deaf Ears: The Limits of the Bully Pulpit" (Yale University Press). But bullying does not translate into an effective bully pulpit once someone is in the Oval Office, Edwards says. "Presidents rarely move public opinion in their direction. That's fundamental," Edwards says. "You cannot govern based on the premise of expanding your coalition, but not everything presidents do lack public support. Turns out many things this president does lack public support."

Trump's frustrations are hardly peculiar to his presidency. New commanders-in-chief commonly find that their agendas are easily thwarted by the opposing party, their own parties, interest groups, independent agencies and the courts. But Trump is hamstrung by a double difficulty, analysts say: he started out with a lower-than-normal reservoir of political capital, and he's acting as though he started out with more of it.

Not only did Trump lose the popular vote, Peterson notes, but he lost it by a bigger margin than anyone who has nonetheless won the presidency by securing the Electoral College majority. While his party hung onto majorities in the House and Senate, the GOP lost seats in both chambers in the 2016 elections. And his approval ratings are dismal, hitting the upper-middle 30s.

"On all the traditional metrics of political capital for an incoming president, Trump is kind of in an historically adverse position," Peterson says. And that weakens the president when he needs to wheedle a lawmaker or foreign leader into backing him up on policy, notes Neil Buchanan, a George Washington University law professor who has written on the topic.

"There hasn't been anything like an open revolt" by congressional Republicans, Buchanan says. "But the problem is that when the president is unpopular, he can't say to people, 'go along with me, because I'm what's hot right now.' He can try to go to rallies, where he gets his avid base," but that is not necessarily going to translate into the votes Trump needs on the Hill to pass health care overhaul, a tax reform plan or a budget – let alone more controversial elements like a border wall, he says.

Instead of reaching out an olive branch of conciliation and compromise, Trump is acting like he has a definitive mandate, experts say – and it's not going over well.

When things looked tenuous on a Senate bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with a measure with tax cuts for wealthier Americans and deep cuts to Medicaid, the GOP needed to win over people like Sen. Dean Heller of Nevada. Heller is considered the most vulnerable of GOP senators seeking re-election next year, and voting for a measure the Congressional Budget Office projects would result in 22 million fewer people getting health insurance would surely be used against him.

The Trump-backed group America First Policies ran ads against Heller, accusing him of abandoning his promise to undo Obamacare. The attack on a politically weakened senator from his own party was highly unusual – and to McConnell, who complained about it in a meeting with White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, "beyond stupid." The repeal effort is still teetering.

Nor has Trump been able to convince state governments to help him on a voter fraud commission – a panel critics say was set up largely to intimidate voters. The pushback from some Democratic-governed sates was predictable; California, a state Trump has insisted he really won, but was denied because of unsubstantiated voting by non-citizens, was the first to say no. Providing sensitive voter data, said California Secretary of State Alex Padilla, would serve only "to legitimize the false and already debunked claims of massive voter fraud made by the president" and the commission's leaders.

But red states are refusing to cough up the information, too. Even Georgia, one the first states, in 2005, to pass its own voter ID law, balked. There is "an eagerness of these state election directors and secretaries of state to remind the federal government that running elections is a state prerogative," says Charles Stewart, an elections expert at MIT. "The federal government is not going to get this without a fight."

When it comes to dealing with the G-20, Trump is already facing a tough audience, since the very nature of the forum makes it difficult to negotiate one-on-one, says Scott Morris, senior fellow and director of the U.S. Development Policy Initiative at the Center for Global Development. "He is the president of the United States. They are forced to deal with him and his team, because they want to make progress on issues," Morris says, and foreign leaders have to put their personal feelings aside.

But Trump's defiance complicated his G-20 visit even before he arrived, and on his first full day there. German Chancellor Angela Merkel told her nation's parliament that "we cannot expect easy talks" on climate change, after Trump pulled the United States out of the Paris accord to combat global warming. And the day before Trump was to meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin, the U.S. president indicated at a news conference Thursday that he doubted intelligence reports that Russia alone interfered with the U.S. elections last year.

All that plays very well with the hardcore Trump backers who come to his rallies and reject any criticism of him at home or abroad, experts say. But that will get Trump only so far, Edwards says. "He's got a base which seems to love him, but it's not big enough" to help him achieve his agenda, Edwards says. Trump's approach "is more applicable to campaigning than governing." And governing, Edwards notes, employs a bully pulpit – not a bully.