President’s supporters unfazed amid tumult
For Parson Hicks, a health care finance executive who supports President Donald Trump, this past week has felt a little like déjà 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 that Trump’s support among Republican leaders and some Republican voters is weakening. But in an increas ingly 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.
Hicks, who is black and grew up in Charlotte, N.C., welcomes the public soul-searching on the meaning of Confederate monuments. She believes that the statues were erected to intimidate black people and that they should be taken down. But instead of focusing on that, she sees opponents of Trump focusing on Trump.
“This is not about me as a black person, and my history,” she said. “This is about this president and wanting to take him down because you don’t like him.”
Is there anything Trump could do that would change the minds of his supporters? For the most loyal, probably not. A recent Monmouth University poll found that, of the current 41 percent of Americans who approve of the job he is doing, 61 percent say they cannot see Trump doing anything that would make them disapprove of him.
But for many others, support is conditional. Michael Dye, a 52-year-old engineer who is the treasurer for the Republican Party in Annapolis, Md., said he was “a bit stunned” that Trump had not focused more on condemning what was a large neo-Nazi march through the middle of the University of Virginia, Dye’s alma mater.
“At best it is naive to think that the people showing up for the original protest were there simply because they were upset that this statue was being taken down,” said Dye, who said he voted reluctantly for Trump.
Of the chant “Jews will not replace us,” he said: “You can argue that it was 10 percent of the crowd. But there are those types in there and I’ve got a problem with that and I wish he’d specified that.”
Even with his reservations, Dye said he would still vote for Trump. He wants his party to hold the reins and steer policy, and if Trump is the only route to that, he will take it.
“This is not about me as a black person, and my history. This is about this president and wanting to take him down because you don’t like him.” Parson Hicks, Donald Trump supporter