Economy, world stability hint at how Trump survives

Here is a provocation that might just be true: The most important moment in the impeachment battle thus far did not take place in the Capitol or in the republic of Ukraine, but when President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey met with Mike Pence and agreed to a cease-fire in northern Syria, thus limiting the scope of the moral and strategic debacle created by Donald Trump’s betrayal of the Kurds.

I’m not suggesting that the American public, in all its wisdom, cares more about the doughty Kurds or the lines of political control in Syria than it does about abuses of presidential power. But I am suggesting that part of the country relies on general heuristics rather than the specific details of presidential misconduct to determine when it might support something like impeachment. In which case any strategy congressional Democrats pursue or any defense served up by Jim Jordan or Lindsey Graham matters less to Trump’s fate than the answers to two basic questions: Is the economy OK? Is the world falling apart?

This supposition is based on a thin historical record. We have exactly two impeachment case studies in the modern era, Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon, which involved very different fact patterns and unspooled in very different ways.

But the simplest explanation is that Nixon didn’t survive because his second term featured a series of economic shocks — summarized by political theorist Jacob Levy as “an oil crisis, a stock market crash, stagflation and recession” — while Clinton’s second term was the most recent peak of American power, pride and optimism. Neither the nature of the crimes nor the state of the political parties seem to matter as much as whether an embattled president is seen as presiding over stability or crisis, over good times or potential ruin.

So we shouldn’t be surprised at Trump’s survival, and we shouldn’t assume that it can be explained only by polarization or hyper-partisanship.

Of course it matters that Trump’s party is craven and debased; of course it matters that the Democrats have swung to an ideological extreme. But maybe it matters more to Trump’s approval ratings that he is presiding over a period of general stability, at home and abroad.

The idea that the Trump era is stable probably seems unpersuasive to people who follow the D.C. carnival obsessively; the idea that it is more stable than the later Obama years may seem like a joke. But one reason Trump managed to get elected was that the waning years of Barack Obama’s second term felt chaotic and dangerous across multiple fronts.

And if you don’t pay attention to the chaos in the nation’s capital, the Trump era has been arguably calmer than 201416. The migrant crisis and white-nationalist terrorism have both worsened, but the late-Obama-era crime increase appears to have subsided, campuses and cities have been relatively calm, Russia’s aggression has given way to stalemate, the Islamic State’s defeat has been mostly completed and Islamist terrorism has grown more sporadic. Meanwhile the economy has grown steadily.

This environment has created constituencies that get less attention than the “with the president even if he shoots someone on Fifth Avenue” sort of Trump voter, but might matter more to how impeachment plays out.