A Deal Breaker for Trump’s Supporters? Nope. Not This Time, Either.
For
Parson Hicks, a health care finance executive who supports President
Trump, this past week has felt a little like déjà vu. Mr. Trump says
something. His opponents howl and then predict, with certainty, a point
of no return.
The
last time this happened, she said, was in October with the notorious
“Access Hollywood” recording of Mr. Trump talking lewdly about women.
His opponents were sure he was finished. His supporters knew better.
“Let’s
be honest, the people who are currently outraged are the same people
who have always been outraged,” said Ms. Hicks, 35, a lifelong
Republican who lives in Boston. “The media makes it seem like something
has changed, when in reality nothing has.”
It
was a week of incessant tumult, when Mr. Trump tumbled into open
warfare with some in his own party over his statements on the violence
in Charlottesville, Va.; business executives abandoned his advisory councils;
top military leaders pointedly made statements denouncing racism in a
way he did not; and his embattled chief strategist, Stephen K. Bannon, stepped down.
But around the country, Mr. Trump’s supporters — and, according to many
polls, Republicans more broadly — agreed with his interpretation of a
swirl of racially charged events and stood with him amid still more
clatter and churn.
Sixty-seven
percent of Republicans said they approved of the president’s response
to the violence in Charlottesville last weekend, compared with just 10
percent of Democrats, according to a CBS News survey conducted over the past week.
Continue reading the main story
It’s
an indication of what now seems an almost immutable law of the Trump
presidency. There are signs that Mr. Trump’s support among Republican
leaders and some Republican voters is weakening. But in an increasingly
tribal America, with people on the left and the right getting
information from different sources and seeing the same facts in
different ways, it reflects the way Mr. Trump has become in many ways
both symbol and chief agitator of a divided nation.
Moral outrage at Mr. Trump’s response to Charlottesville continues to glow white hot, but it has a largely partisan tinge.
From
Ms. Hicks’s perspective, the president simply pointed out a fact:
Leftists bore some responsibility for the violence, too. Of course,
Nazis and white supremacists are bad, she said. But she does not believe
Mr. Trump has any affinity for them. He said so himself. But she is
exasperated that a significant part of the country seems to think
otherwise. The week’s frenzied headlines read to her like bulletins from
another planet.
“I
feel like I am in a bizarro universe where no one but me is thinking
logically,” she said. “We have gone so off the rails of what this
conversation is about.” Read the full article, here.
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