Don’t buy polls now selling GOP approval of Helsinki
No doubt many are sincere, but some probably just think it sounds cool to say such things.
It’s a flawed analogy, but I’m reminded of the early days of the Iraq War, when polls showed strong support for President George W. Bush and his foreign policy even as evidence mounted that the conflict was going to be much tougher and uglier than many (including yours truly) had hoped. If you went solely by the polls and what elected Republicans said on TV, you’d have had a poor understanding of what was really going through the minds of many Republicans.
Bush’s approval ratings among Republicans were unnaturally held aloft by many of the same factors boosting Trump today. The overheated rhetoric from Trump’s opponents, their veering leftward on issue after issue, and the increasing partisanship of the media: These things encourage Republicans to stick it out with Trump, and to stick it to his critics.
During the Iraq War, conservative dissenters and critics were often demonized or ostracized for their supposed treason or disloyalty.
Many on the right either hope or fear that Trump is transforming the GOP into a nationalist-populist party. I think it’s too soon to say. The first time conservatives seriously turned on Bush was not over the war, but over his attempt to put Harriet Miers on the Supreme Court in 2005.
That is how the camel’s back gets broken — not by the heavy load, but by the last straw.
Trump may succeed in permanently MAGA-fying the GOP. But making straight-line predictions about the future based on snapshots of the present is always folly in politics, because events get in the way.
Indeed, events don’t just change the future; they change the past. In early 2003, 63 percent of Americans supported the Iraq War. Twelve years later, a YouGov poll found that only 38 percent of Americans said they had favored the war at the time.
One can easily envision a world a dozen years hence in which very few Republicans even remember supporting the Helsinki bromance.