The inconvenient Trump truth: Core voters love him
Forget Twitter rants, collusion and the White House becoming “Crazytown”. Trump’s enemies forget his base loves that kind of crazy.
During his campaign for the US presidency, Donald Trump made a memorable quip about the resilience of his support in the face of revelations about his behaviour: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” he said, miming the cocking of a revolver’s hammer as he looked straight into the camera lens.
Like many of Mr Trump’s utterances it seemed hyperbolic at best, demonstrably false at worst.
At least it underlined that point about the need to take his rhetoric seriously, if not literally. But, a little over a year and a half into his administration, it looks as though it might be that rare thing from this president, a verifiably true statement.
Not that, as far as we know, Mr Trump has actually gunned anyone down on the streets of Manhattan.
But consider the figurative carnage: The president’s ex-campaign manager, his ex-deputy campaign manager, his longstanding personal lawyer, his national security adviser and another member of his foreign policy team have all either been found guilty of felonies, or have pleaded guilty to felonious activities.
On Thursday, an anonymous article published in The New York Times revealed that members of Trump’s cabinet had discussed trying to remove him from office because of his apparent mental instability and moral weakness. The author, an unnamed official, said there was a “resistance” movement at the top of government to counter the president’s instincts and to limit his influence on policy.
Meanwhile, Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor, digs deeper into allegations of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin in the 2016 election.
“HE’S GONE OFF THE RAILS”
Yet another fly-on-the-Oval Office-wall book, by Bob Woodward of The Washington Post,
contains anecdotes that make Nero’s palace look like a McKinsey seminar.
One of them (which the White House denies) is the alleged verdict of John Kelly, Mr Trump’s chief of staff, on his boss: “He’s an idiot. It’s pointless to try to convince him of anything. He’s gone off the rails. We’re in Crazytown.”
Trump denounces his fellow Americans, from Jeff Sessions, his attorney-general ("DISGRACEFUL") to the late John McCain, the senator who served five years in a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp ("John McCain is a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.")
He hasn’t yet attacked Jesus Christ (Perhaps: “He got crucified. I like people that don’t get crucified") or George Washington ("Gave up the presidency and went back to his farm. QUITTER!") but as with the putative victim lying in the middle of Fifth Avenue, would anyone care if he did?
According to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News opinion poll the president enjoys an approval rating of 46 per cent. Not stellar by historical standards but respectable and actually a smidgen better than Barack Obama at the same point in his presidency.
Though the Republicans face an uphill slog in the midterm elections in November, right now few would bet against Mr Trump being re-elected in 2020.
What’s going on? There does seem to be a core of voters who will stand by the president no matter what. Call them the Fifth Avenue Gang, who may account for 20 per cent of voters. But there appear to be more Americans who approve of Mr Trump not out of personal loyalty but out of a broader solidarity and belief that, flawed though he may be, he is all that stands between them and a culture and political system that is tilted against them.
Trump voters are united by their revulsion at an establishment that continues to disdain them and promote a left-of-centre worldview.
To get a sense of what irks them, consider some of the other news this week.
It was revealed that First Man, the new film about the Apollo 11 mission, won’t feature Neil Armstrong planting the American flag on the moon, because in the words of Ryan Gosling, the actor who plays him, the moon landing “transcended countries and borders”.
Nike, the largest sports equipment maker, announced that the face of its new advertising campaign is Colin Kaepernick, the American footballer who caused controversy two years ago by refusing to stand for the national anthem at matches in protest at what he said was police brutality against minorities.
This week executives at Facebook and Twitter went to Capitol Hill to insist, in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary, that their platforms do not discriminate against conservatives.
These may not seem like great battles in an existential culture war. But they accentuate the sense among many conservative Americans that their country is being led by people who don’t share their views on issues such as illegal immigration, law and order, traditional American values.
That was long deemed true of the people who run academia and the media, but it looks increasingly as though business, especially technology companies whose products now control the flow of content to hundreds of millions of Americans, is moving in lock-step.
Another event this week will have reminded reluctant Trump supporters why they might look past his misdeeds.
Confirmation hearings for Mr Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, Brett Kavanaugh, a conservative jurist, were repeatedly disrupted by left-wing protesters who tried to shut them down.
Some Democratic senators even insisted that the hearings should not be taking place at all.
It was, in its way, an allegory for our times: a conservative, one whose views are doubtless shared by tens of millions of Americans, trying to get a hearing, drowned out by an insistent, unyielding noise from the left.
— The Times
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