Donald Trump’s presidency has been a roller coaster of constant controversy. It seems not a day goes by without a tweet or comment that, in normal times and under normal circumstances, might have sunk a presidency.
From this chaos has emerged a fairly consistent news-cycle rhythm that is particularly noticeable to those of us in the polling world; for every big dust-up, there is the subsequent ask: “Will this be the thing that costs Trump some of his base?” Cutting deals with Chuck and Nancy? Tariffs that hurt farmers? Stormy Daniels? Paul Manafort? Comey? Child separations at the border? Any of it?
And the answer is almost always: No. I have, in the past, referred to Trump’s job approval as “freakishly stable” given its very limited mobility in what feels like a topsy-turvy political environment. This is in large part because voters are fairly dug-in on Trump and won’t budge, no matter what happens. Those who have come around to supporting President Trump are loathe to concede any points to Trump’s critics and vice versa.
Even from the moment of his inauguration, 40 percent of America already “strongly disapproved” of the job he was doing as president. There simply isn’t much of anywhere for his numbers to go, up or down. (Even after the president’s widely-condemned response to the Charlottesville protests last August, his job approval only dipped by a handful of points among Republicans and did not budge at all with independents or Democrats — with those groups, they were already as low as they could get. His numbers fully recovered a few months later.)
Which brings us to the debacle in Helsinki. Statistician Nate Silver proposed a Trump administration crisis scale based upon the level of Trump loyalist who publicly criticizes an action, and the president’s comments siding with Russian President Vladimir Putin over the reports of his own intelligence agencies, publicly and on the global stage, reached a 9.2 on this fictional ten-point scale with the hosts of Fox & Friends urging the president to play clean-up.
Republican luminaries these days see little value in criticizing the president, as it merely reduces their potential influence with the White House, fails to win over any of the president’s opponents, and depresses or alienates their own voter base. For so many to come out and contradict the president certainly raised the prospect that this time was different. But why might Helsinki have been different? To understand this, it is important to understand how most controversies facing the White House align with existing beliefs about who President Trump is, the attributes and characteristics that make up the man in the Oval Office.
Pollsters have been asking voters to assess President Trump’s character and personality over the last few years. Even many of the president’s own supporters will concede certain things, such as the idea that he is reckless or that he is not exactly warm-and-fuzzy. Critics of the president will say, for instance, that he is ill-tempered, but that is already priced into Trump’s numbers; only one-third of Americans, and only two-thirds of Republicans, view Trump as “level-headed.” In that same poll, less than half say that Trump does not care about average Americans, that he does not have good leadership skills, that he is not honest.
But there is one attribute where Trump does quite well: strength. While only 66 percent of Republicans say Trump is level headed, 95 percent say he is a “strong person.” Even among independents, who rate Trump poorly on most other attributes, 64 percent say Trump is strong.
Yes, what happened in Helsinki was reckless — a freewheeling press conference standing next to an adversary where the president was not heeding the counsel of his advisers. But recklessness is par for the course with President Trump. When voters sent a wrecking ball to Washington they did so with an awareness that it might break things.
But what happened in Helsinki was also weak. It was the sort of thing that, had any other U.S. President done it, would have inspired wails of outrage from many of the same corners that vociferously defend the president’s original remarks today.
To stand next to an adversary — an adversary who actively seeks to undermine the West and disrupt the peaceful, liberal democratic order of the U.S. and its allies — and to say you trust him over your own people, and think by the way that your own country has done some very bad things, is madness, yes. But it is also weak and cowardly. Those are things America cannot afford to be. Those are things Brand Trump cannot afford to be, either.
