To some in Connecticut, Trump can do no wrong Harvey could become first hurricane to strike Texas since 2008

At a boisterous rally in Phoenix late Tuesday, President Donald Trump gave a speech to hundreds of loyal supporters whose faith in the president is unshaken by recent criticism over how he handled the violence in Charlottesville, Va., and other controversies.

There are plenty of them in Connecticut, too.

In his unscripted and angry speech Tuesday, Trump defended his reaction to the violence at the white supremacist rally that claimed a life of a counter-protester. He blamed the media, not his comments after the incident, for deepening divisions in the country.

“It’s time to expose the crooked media deceptions,” Trump said. “They’re very dishonest people,” he added, and the crowd roared with approval.

Despite low and declining job-approval numbers and a series of reversals and controversies, Trump can count on a significant number of loyal supporters who are shaking up conventional politics in every state, including Connecticut.

They like the president’s tough stance on immigration and promises to bring back jobs lost through corporate outsourcing. But perhaps more importantly, Trump supporters view the president as an antidote to what they view is corruption in mainstream Washington, D.C., politics.

Bryan Pataky of Bridgeport is among them.

Pataky, owner of a bail bonds company, said he doesn’t know if Trump “is correct 100 percent of the time” but supports the president’s agenda — and his outsider status.

“I was so amazed that he was saying what I felt has been true with D.C. politicians,” Pataky said.

The loyalty of Trump supporters is a phenomenon that is bad news for conventional party politics, said Yascha Mounk, a lecturer on political theory at Harvard University.

Mounk said partisanship in the United States is dangerously deep. “Partisanship has always been part of our matrix,” he said. “But now it is much more so.”

He said it’s become a part of a person’s identity, shaping an individual’s world view so much that it influences even what type of movie a person will go to see.

He also said that this type of “tribalism” exists on both sides of the political spectrum, but has increased more on the right than on the left after Trump’s election. “Republicans have moved farther to the right, and Democrats to the left, but not as much so,” Mounk said.

Last week, a national survey of Trump supporters by Monmouth University in New Jersey indicated 61 percent said they could not “think of anything that Trump could do, or fail to do, in his term as president that would make (them) disapprove of the job he is doing.”

To Trump supporter Dominic Rapini, who is challenging Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., for Senate, the president’s controversial comments in the aftermath of the violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., were “a disaster.”

“He could have done better,” said Rapini, a businessman from Branford. “The press conference at Trump Tower never should have happened. He picked the wrong battle at the wrong time.”

In that news conference, Trump said, “I think there is blame on both sides” for the violence and that there were “very fine people” on both sides.

Rapini, however, said Trump’s mishandling of the situation did not shake his support for the president.

“If the president deviates from his agenda, that would shake me,” Rapini said.

He said Trump won the support of so many because “we wanted an outsider.”

“Insiders were not getting it done,” Rapini said. “But it may not be pretty at times.”

Winning nearly 41 percent of the vote in Connecticut, Trump did better in the state than any Republican presidential candidate since George W. Bush in 1988.

Some of those voters pulled the lever for Trump only because he was the GOP candidate. But others are true loyalists. The true “teflon-coated” presidency may not be that of Ronald Reagan, but of Donald Trump.

Politico says that at least one-third of GOP primary voters identify themselves as “Trump Republicans” (as opposed to “tea party Republicans” or “mainstream Republicans”) in state after state, according to internal polling conducted by a Republican group, with that number reaching 40 percent in some states.

Lori Hopkins-Cavanagh, a New London real estate broker who hosts a conservative radio show called “Lori on Liberty,” is among the president’s more conservative supporters.

She calls herself a “right nationalist” and decries the “white bashing” she says “is a result of eight years of the Obama administration.”

She said she is “not sympathetic to anyone who got hurt in Charlottesville, except for the two cops who were doing their jobs.” A counterprotester, Heather Heyer, was killed and 19 others were injured when a member of the white supremacist rally ran his car into the crowd.

To Hopkins-Cavanaugh, Trump was right to condemn violence “on both sides.” Although she ran for Congress as a Republican, she has little regard for the national Republicans who condemned the president for his equivalency and his defense of confederate statues.

“There is no such thing as a Republican in D.C. anymore,” Hopkins-Cavanaugh said.

Republican officials and political candidates were either silent of muted in their remarks about Trump’s comments about Charlottesville, even as they condemned neo-Nazi violence and the white supremacist movement.

Ron Schurin, a political science professor at the University of Connecticut, said the loyalty of Trump supporters may be the reason Trump was not faulted.

“They are afraid of the activists who come out in the primaries,” Schurin said. “Leading Republicans who might be looking to their political futures are afraid of alienating Trump supporters in a statewide primary.”

That’s especially true since Republicans in Connecticut are “doing better at the local level” in local contests and races for the General Assembly and have a good chance at winning the governor’s seat next year, Schurin said.

Scott McLean, chair of the political science department at Quinnipiac University, said there was another time when Trump’s behavior was criticized by Connecticut Republicans, but Trump was not condemned for it.

That was last summer, when Trump’s crude remarks about women were revealed in leaked Access Hollywood tapes, Mc Lean said.

“Connecticut Republicans only condemned the remarks, not Trump himself,” McLean said.

Last week, a national survey of Trump supporters by Monmouth University in New Jersey indicated 61 percent said they could not “think of anything that Trump could do, or fail to do, in his term as president that would make (them) disapprove of the job he is doing.”

Ana Radelat is a reporter for The Connecticut Mirror (www. ctmirror.org). Copyright 2017 © The Connecticut Mirror. aradelat@ctmirror.org

Harvey, which could strengthen into the first hurricane to strike Texas since 2008 this week, has forced workers to be evacuated from Gulf of Mexico platforms and sent cotton rallying.

Currently a tropical depression, Harvey was 470 miles southeast of Port Mansfield, Texas, with top winds of 35 miles per hour, the U.S. National Hurricane Center said in an advisory at 11 a.m. New York time. It could develop into a hurricane just before landfall.

“It could intensify right up to landfall on Friday,” said Jeff Masters, co-founder of Weather Underground in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “I expect a Category 1 hurricane at landfall, but I cannot rule out a Category 2.”

The Gulf Coast from Corpus Christi, Texas, to Lake Charles, La., is home to nearly 30 refineries — making up about 7 million barrels a day of refining capacity — and is in the path of heavy rainfall expected to start as early as Friday. Flooding poses risks to operations, while torrential rains can shut units and cause supply disruptions.

Fuel supplies in the region may be tightened further by other refinery outages. Phillips 66 began a plantwide shutdown of its Lake Charles, La., refinery late Tuesday after its power supplier warned of a high potential for electrical failure, according to a company statement.

“Biggest impact of this storm will be a significant reduction of crude oil imports into the Texas Gulf Coast, resulting in refineries cutting crude rates,” Andy Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates in Houston, said by email. “There will also be a significant impact on petroleum product exports impacting supplies into Mexico.”

Ike in 2008 was the last hurricane to hit Texas, said Dennis Feltgen, spokesman for the National Hurricane Center. Ike struck as a Category 2 storm on the five-step Saffir Simpson scale.

Heavy Rains

Along the coastline, seas could rise 4 to 6 feet above ground level and from 10 to 15 inches of rain will probably fall across parts of Texas into Louisiana, the hurricane center said. Some areas could get as much as 20 inches of rain.

“It is going to be a wet one,” Masters said. “It is not going to move fast after landfall and that is going to cause big trouble” from flooding rains.

The current track calls for the storm to land in southeastern Texas and then turn toward Houston. Masters said at least one computer-forecast model shows the storm heading back into the Gulf of Mexico early next week before coming ashore in Texas again.

Anadarko Petroleum Corp. said Tuesday it removed nonessential staff from some oil and gas production platforms in the Gulf of Mexico in response to weather conditions.

Cotton rallied on speculation the storm will threaten U.S. crops. On ICE Futures U.S. in New York, cotton for December delivery climbed 1.8 percent to 69.03 cents a pound after earlier reaching the highest since Aug. 10.