Donald Trump traveled to Florida on Friday at the end of a nightmarish week for the nation. The shooting deaths of 17 people, many of them teenagers, has sent the nation reeling into an increasingly routinized cycle of grievance and recrimination. The familiar debate over what federal response, if any, could have prevented this atrocity or interdict future episodes of mass violence has, however, largely bypassed the president. Trump tweeted condolences, and he briefly addressed the nation, but his presence in the post-Parkland shooting national debate was almost apparitional. The response to this event has largely focused on the Republican majority in Congress. That is instructive; after a year of near ubiquity, Donald Trump might be relinquishing the hold he has had on the national imagination.
For example, this should not have been a great week for the president.
The Mueller probe is back in the news. This week, Rick Gates, a former senior advisor to Trump’s 2016 campaign, began finalizing a plea deal—making him the third former campaign official to cooperate with the special counsel probe into Russian meddling in the campaign. On Friday, Mueller’s office announced the indictment of 13 Russians and 3 Russian “entities” that allegedly worked on the campaign’s behalf. The indictment alleged that these agents communicated with “unwitting” elements of the Trump campaign’s structure to coordinate political activities.
The scandal involving Rob Porter, the former West Wing staffer who was credibly alleged to have verbally and physically abused women, entered its second week. New revelations in that scandal suggest that senior White House staff were aware of the allegations against Porter for months and covered them up.
Elsewhere in Washington, administration head David Shulkin’s chief of staff was alleged by the inspector general’s office to have falsified email records and made false statements to justify using government funds for the personal use of the secretary’s wife. EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has had to explain why he spent vast sums of taxpayer dollars on extravagant flight accommodations—even quick trips between Washington D.C. and New York City. The explanation he settled on is that he has had several frightening encounters with the general public, the avoidance of which necessitated first-class upgrades. In Congress, Donald Trump’s preferred immigration compromise went down in flames. It garnered just 39 votes in the Senate of the 60 needed to pass, losing the support of 14 Republicans in the process.
Finally, this week saw the reinvigoration of stories involving Donald Trump’s serial lechery. Amid an FEC inquiry, Michael Cohen, Trump’s personal attorney, admitted that he paid the adult film actress Stormy Daniels $130,000 from his personal accounts to keep her quiet about the alleged affair she had with the president. Daniels has said the admission has invalidated a non-disclosure agreement and will now tell all. Before she had the chance, though, another story broke involving Trump’s alleged involvement with an adult model: Karen McDougal. That story, however, is less about the affair than the National Enquirer’s efforts to keep damaging news about Trump from gracing their front pages.
This rough week for Trump was not, however, all that different from the last rough week for Trump.
By this time last week, the president was taking personal ownership of Porter’s scandalous conduct and his administration’s attempts to shield him from the consequences of his actions. Amid reports that Chief of Staff John Kelly and Communications Director Hope Hicks had misled the president, and Kelly was prepared to resign over it, Trump heaped praise on the alleged wife beater, wished him well, and attacked the #MeToo movement. Hours earlier, the president had signed the Tea Party’s death certificate in the form of a two-year budget deal that added hundreds of billions to the deficit after the government shut down for the second time in as many months.
None of this seems to have had much of an impact on Donald Trump’s standing in the polls. According to the Real Clear Politics average of the president’s job approval ratings, Donald Trump is now just 11 points underwater with approximately 42 percent of the public approving of the job he’s doing in office and 53 percent disapproving. That might not sound like great shakes, but everything is relative. Trump is currently in the best position he’s seen since May of last year, down from nearly 21 points underwater in December.
Early last week, the Weekly Standard’s David Byler suggested this rebound is due to a combination of a variety of factors. The president’s ability to avoid igniting a Twitter controversy and the passage of the tax code reform bill, which brought frustrated Republican voters back into the fold, were perhaps the most significant contributors. The president’s decision to court controversy last week by heaping scorn on the #MeToo movement while standing behind his alleged batterer of a staffer suggests that presidential silence isn’t as much of a factor in Trump’s rebound as previously believed. In the week that elapsed since he made those comments, Trump’s job approval has maintained its general upward trajectory.
We’re left to conclude that poll respondents are beginning to tune out the stuff that dominates political media. For months, Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans managed to avoid any credit for the state of the economy. It is possible that passage of the tax code reform law has allowed Republicans in Washington to take ownership of the economy in voters’ minds. That also diminishes Trump’s role in affairs. For Republican voters, in particular, scandals involving the embrace of wife-beating staffers, adultery and hush money, and attacks on a movement dedicated to justice for abused women don’t have the effect on Trump’s polling they once did because Trump doesn’t loom as large in their minds anymore.
The president’s support of a credibly accused child abuser in his campaign for the U.S. Senate and his tortured effort to absolve violent white nationalists of exclusive culpability for the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, had dramatic negative effects on Trump’s polling. That was not because those events were especially repulsive to voters, though they were that, but because they led to schisms within the GOP. An unambiguously well-received legislative achievement seems to have upended that dynamic and convinced Republican voters to come “home” to Trump. At least, for now, they’re not going anywhere.
