To Trump’s supporters, it went well

For Parson Hicks, a health care finance executive who supports President Donald Trump, last week has felt a little like deja vu. 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 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 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 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, Steve Bannon, stepped down. But around the country, 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.

It’s an indication of what now seems an almost immutable law of the Trump presidency. There are signs Trump’s support among Republican leaders and some Republican voters is weakening. But in an increasingly tribal United States, 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 Trump has become in many ways both symbol and chief agitator of a divided nation.

Moral outrage at Trump’s response to Charlottesville continues to glow white hot, but it has a largely partisan tinge.

From Hicks’ 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 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.”