President’s loyalists skeptical of inquiries
Faith not shaken despite concerns about meddling
Donald Trump’s supporters tend to accept declarations by the president that investigations have been overblown or misdirected. Their loyalty has been an important political strength for Trump.
JoAnne Musial has no particular regard for Vladimir Putin, but she does trust Donald Trump. That’s enough for her to cast a suspicious eye toward the furor over Russian interference, campaign collusion and whatever allegations may await the president she backed in 2016.
“They think Putin is playing him,” said Musial, a 66-year-old retiree from Canadensis, Pennsylvania. “I think Trump is playing him a little bit . ... That’s the gut feeling I’ve had: Everyone’s got it all backwards.”
The loyalty of Trump’s voters has been a political strength for the president through 18 tumultuous months in the White House. Now, while two-thirds of those supporters believe Russia interfered in the 2016 election, they tend to accept declarations by the president and his team that the allegations and investigations have been overblown or misdirected – a conclusion with potentially enormous consequences down the road.
If and when special counsel Robert
Mueller releases a public report, those voters are poised to take any negative findings with a grain of salt. As the investigation has intensified, their predictions of how history will judge Trump’s presidency have risen.
“The longer it goes, the less faith I have it’s going to be anything but a circus act,” said Barney Clark, 51, a medical device account manager in St. Marys, Georgia.
John Karr, 75, a retiree in Federal Way, Washington, said he’s not sure Russia interfered – not that it matters to him, anyway. “No matter what happens and how many millions Mueller spends, he can’t do a damn thing about what they did or didn’t do,” he said.
Karr and others serve on USA TODAY’s Trump Voter Panel, a floating focus group that provides an occasional touch point with the president’s original supporters. They tend to be suspicious about Russia’s motives; many lived through the Cold War. But they’re split between viewing Russia as an “enemy” or as a “competitor,” which is the word Trump uses to describe Moscow. Some voiced concern over Trump’s controversial news conference with Putin after the Helsinki summit.
Even so, 17 of the 23 panel members who responded rated Trump’s policy toward Russia as “about right”; just five said it was “not tough enough.” One was undecided. In interviews by email and phone, most said their faith remained unshaken in Trump as a leader delivering on campaign promises.
They spoke as scrutiny continues of Russia’s role in the 2016 election and what role it may have in the midterm elections three months away. Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, is now being prosecuted on unrelated charges of financial fraud in the first trial by the special counsel. And Facebook has announced detection of a secret campaign to influence November’s election by stoking racial and other social divisions.
But almost all of these Trump supporters were willing to accept at least some of the many explanations that the president and his attorney, Rudy Giuliani, have offered – that there was no campaign collusion with Russia, or it wasn’t a crime if there was, and anyway, everybody does it. Some panelists said any collusion was with Hillary Clinton’s campaign, not Trump’s, an assertion the president has made that’s not supported by congressional investigations and others.
Trump continues to press his case with his enormous social media audience. On Twitter Wednesday, he called on Attorney General Jeff Sessions to “stop this Rigged Witch Hunt right now, before it continues to stain our country any further.” He wrote, “Bob Mueller is totally conflicted, and his 17 Angry Democrats that are doing his dirty work are a disgrace to USA!”
Those messages find a receptive audience among his core backers.
On Russia and Putin, “people act surprised they meddled,” said Francis Smazal, 55, a registered nurse from Marshfield, Wisconsin. “I would be more surprised if he didn’t.” Moscow is an adversary of the United States, Smazal noted: “Russia wants to prosper and survive, like we do. Sometimes that involves taking cookies away from us.”
Two-thirds of the panelists said they didn’t believe Russian interference was a threat in the midterm elections this fall or the presidential contest in 2020.
The 25-member group was drawn from Trump voters in the USA TODAY/ Suffolk University polls. This was the seventh time they have been surveyed and interviewed about the president they helped elect.