MACKINAC ISLAND — Republicans in Michigan, where Donald Trump triumphantly stamped the election last year, are giving the president mixed reviews nine months into his term in light of the all-but-dead effort to undo the Obama-era health care law.

While Trump still remains popular with the Michigan GOP’s base, a number of state party loyalists attending a weekend conference expressed disappointment in the president’s administration and his demeanor.

Some who criticize Trump struggled to excuse his blustery comments and stalled legislative record, masking their disappointment by faulting leaders in the GOP-controlled Congress for stymieing the man they backed last year as a take-charge leader.

And while Trump’s name draws applause from large audiences, some say privately his first year isn’t what they had hoped for when he rolled to victory through their state and nearby Midwestern battlegrounds in November.

“It’s not going as well as it should,” Paul McClorey said of the Trump administration.

McClorey, a construction company owner from near Lansing, and his wife, Alison, were among about 2,000 Michigan Republicans attending the Mackinac Leadership Conference, a biennial gathering on the scenic island between the Upper and Lower peninsulas.

Though the two-day event’s public speakers have praised Trump from the podium in the Grand Hotel’s opulent dining room, in conversations next door in the windowed parlor overlooking Lake Huron a more nuanced theme has emerged: We like him, but not everything we’ve seen from him.

“There are things he says that I just don’t like,” said Linda Kolich, a nurse from Kalamazoo.

She said Trump’s vow during a speech to the United Nations this past week to “totally destroy North Korea” scared her. And his reference to North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un as “Rocket Man” she found “unbecoming to the office of the president.”

Her husband, Greg, suggested that a better approach would be “to speak softly and carry a big stick.”

He said Trump is engaging in “playground B.S.,” by publicly disparaging fellow Republicans such as Arizona Sen. John McCain, who again appears to have blocked the Senate’s attempt to repeal the 2010 Affordable Care Act.