Sunday, July 29, 2018 | 2 a.m.
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The verdict on the most galling week of an outrageous presidency is in, and it shouldn’t come as the shock that it does: Republicans forgive President Donald Trump his surrender to Vladimir Putin, his siding with Russia over the United States, his puppy-dog performance in Helsinki — all of it. Or rather, they don’t see anything to forgive. They simply notice that their man is under attack, and they rise to defend him. Welcome to political tribalism in America in 2018.
On Sunday, NBC News and The Wall Street Journal released a poll that took place mostly after Helsinki. It showed that Trump’s approval rating, which usually hovers around 40 percent, had risen to 45 — still bad but, bafflingly, better than before. Republicans were the reason why. They gave him an approval rating of 88 percent, which is positively alpine and higher than the one that Democrats gave Barack Obama at the same point in his presidency eight years ago.
That figure can’t be dismissed as an outlier. A poll released by SurveyMonkey and Axios showed that 79 percent of Republicans regarded Trump’s meeting with Putin positively.
Say what? His obsequiousness and betrayal of American interests weren’t the whispered allegations of unnamed sources (though he went ahead and dismissed such characterizations as “fake news” anyway). They were caught on camera and preserved forevermore: visible, audible, irrefutable.
That so many Republicans nonetheless shook them off is about as vivid an illustration as you’ll find of the peculiar and chilling nature of partisanship today. But the picture is more complicated and fuzzier than that.
For starters, when these polls were taken, it’s entirely possible that what happened in Helsinki hadn’t sunk in. Most people don’t pay nearly as much attention to the Trump melodrama as those of us lashed to it do, and as we map the confluence of his misdeeds and their moods, we routinely discount the degree to which many of them are tuned out. They have more pleasant things to do than monitor this president. Laundry, for example. Hemorrhoid surgery.
On top of which, the volume and velocity of his offenses turn them into a blur, just as the alarms that we in the media sound become white noise. This was true during his campaign, it’s even truer of his presidency, and it’s one of the most unjust, infuriating aspects of his endurance. His shamelessness is actually his saving grace.
But not with everyone, and most notably not with some aghast Republicans who, thanks to Trump’s takeover of the party, have strayed from it. There’s a fascinating debate about how much the Republican loyalty to Trump in poll after poll is skewed by an exodus of former Republicans whom he scared off. They may not be showing up as party members in surveys, and Trump’s high marks could be coming from a winnowed, favorable sample.
Brendan Nyhan examined this possibility in The Times’ Upshot section last year, describing data that suggested that “people who identify as Republican may stop doing so if they disapprove of Trump, creating a false stability in his partisan approval numbers.” If those people were factored back in, according to this analysis, Trump’s partisan approval rating could dip to 70 percent.
But in a spirited exchange on Twitter with Nate Silver, Nyhan expressed doubts about the significance of that phenomenon to Trump’s rosy Republican numbers, which have at least as much to do with another dynamic.
It’s what some political scientists call negative partisanship. Research shows that, increasingly, Americans on one side of the political divide don’t just disagree with those on the other. They see them as threats to the country’s well-being. Their anger at the opposing party and its leaders is more pervasive. Their disagreement with its prescriptions is strict. They’re not as keen to associate with its adherents. And their unbalanced information diets and narrow ideological enclaves insulate them from its reasoning.
Forget I’m OK, you’re OK. This is: I have problems, you’re repulsive.
The ethos extends to the assessment and defense of Trump’s behavior. He may be an odd fit for a tribe that includes usually judgmental religious conservatives and once exuberant free traders, but he’s now their chief, and whatever his flaws, his detractors’ are worse. If they’re agitated, they’re ipso facto overreacting. Regardless, show no weakness. Admit no wrong.
I doubt that Democrats, faced with a leader like Trump, would fall this pathetically into line. Bill Clinton and his presidency foreshadowed without remotely matching this.
But the impulse to filter out dissenting views, the readiness to regard all political rifts as Manichaean and the quickness to hunker down are bigger than one corrupted party and one cracked president. They bless Trump as he blusters on from Helsinki. They’ll curse all of us for some time to come.
Frank Bruni is a columnist for The New York Times.
