Posted on 08/04/2018 3:41:53 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
HILLSBORO, Ohio — After President Trump’s less-than-stellar performance side by side with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Helsinki, many Trump critics may have hoped, reasonably, that Trump’s approval ratings — already historically low compared with other presidents — would take a nose-dive.
Instead, his numbers remained basically steady. A July NBC/Wall Street Journal sampling even found that Trump’s approval rating climbed one point from the previous month, to 45 percent, and, most notably, his 88 percent approval among Republicans is the highest of his presidency.
Republican pollster Bill McInturff, part of the team that conducted the poll, said the stability in the president’s numbers was noteworthy, considering not only the widely panned summit with Putin but also other controversies, including the separation of families at the border and Trump’s rocky NATO meetings.
Trump’s haters — it is not too strong a word — accuse the GOP base of abandoning its principles or being mindlessly enslaved to the “cult of Trump.” It is time to consider that almost everyone has been misreading the Republican Party’s core for several years.
In 2008 and 2012, the eventual GOP nominee was, in both cases, a compromise candidate. Republicans were not particularly enthusiastic about either John McCain or Mitt Romney, each of whom amassed about 10 million votes in their respective primaries. By contrast, Trump racked up about 14 million primary votes in 2016.
While McCain, a senator from Arizona, is esteemed for his military service and his courage as a POW — Trump’s own ill-conceived comments in 2015 notwithstanding — neither he nor Romney is viewed as a stalwart defender of the GOP; both are willing to criticize their own party at the drop of a hat, like a father constantly ashamed of his own children.
Trump, by comparison, won’t apologize or back down. The base loves him for it.
When I was growing up, my uncle, Bill Kibler, was a figure who both intimidated and fascinated me. A big, loud Navy veteran, farmer, outdoorsman and county Republican Party chairman, Uncle Bill was never shy with an opinion, often stated in the most politically incorrect manner. His verbal daggers frequently targeted his own party.
“They don’t have any guts,” he would say every time Republicans either folded, in his opinion, or acquiesced to the Democrats or the media on one issue or another. “The Democrats never back down or apologize. They play hardball. We’re sissies,” he would say, except sissies was not the word he used.
Uncle Bill passed away in 2008 at age 84, and it is a cosmic injustice that he did not live to see Donald Trump become president.
He would be gratified that, finally, there has arrived a Republican who won’t apologize, come hell or high water, for wanting to enforce immigration laws, for demanding that our allies pony up more for our common defense and — most impressively, as far as the base is concerned — for giving as good as he gets from the media.
It will pain #NeverTrump Republicans to admit it, but the party for which they pine has, for many years, been little more than a figment of their imaginations. The GOP base is not composed of people wringing their hands over Trump’s peccadilloes or embracing the left’s laundry list of grievances.
No, the GOP base is Uncle Bill. It is a coalition of die-hard partisans who have long resented Republicans, past and present, who surrender to Democrats or cater to the liberal media’s definition of appropriateness.
I recently argued that the GOP has become the party of Trump. But it may be more accurate that the party of Trump has existed for years and has just been waiting for Trump to arrive.
The base won’t abandon him — not over Russia, not over family separations, not over Stormy Daniels and company, and certainly not over his attacks on the media.
In 1992, Hillary Clinton famously protested that she wasn’t just some Tammy Wynette-style wife blindly standing by her man despite her husband’s philandering ways. She added, “I’m sitting here because I love him, and I respect him, and I honor what he’s been through and what we’ve been through together.”
Likewise, however badly Trump behaves, and regardless of the criticism he faces, grass-roots Republicans are standing by him and going through it with him, defiantly and without apology. They finally have the president they’ve been waiting for, and they’re not letting him go.
Why is this drivel posted here? We know how much the other side hates us.
I really don’t care about Poll numbers and the like because they can be anything they want them to say depending who is doing the polling and the reporting....
However I agree Trumps base is’t going to move from him. For me...unless he turns fully against his agenda, which I can’t see is going to happen... I’ll gladly give him another four years..he’s already done above and beyond for this country.
To me it was only less than stellar if you’re a new world order globalist neocon. I cheered that both of them in the press conference flip the finger to globalism and talk about the nation state as being best. And I like that Putin pointed out the money our intelligence agencies help funnel to Hillary from oligarchs in his country.
Trump’s base will never turn on him. NEVER, NEVER, NEVER!
(As long as he stays true to the principles of freedom and the rule of Law.)
The general theme of this article is correct. The GOP leadership has not understood its base for over 2 generations...
The only way Trump loses support is if he is viewed as no longer putting America First....
Trump is and always has been the only one who can stop Trump.
His numbers did not “hold steady” they went up.
Trump’s approval rating was 50% just yesterday. It goes up on a regular basis as the moderate dems see what the far left socialist progressive dems want to do.
The dem party is now just the party of far left fringe and the militant anarchists (antifa).
And as somebody else here pointed out, our intelligence agencies getting mad at Trump for saying he doesn’t fully trust them, is like a wife beater getting mad at his wife for not lavishing him with praise when somebody asks what it’s like to be married to him.
Did you read past the thread title?
I read the transcripts of the entire Putin-Trump comments, and saw not a thing to justify the media comments. Apparently that are basing their entire commentary on body language, because what was actually SAID was appropriately diplomatic from both sides.
Wanna get Trump???
Ya gotta go through me first1
Less than stellar performance with Putin huh? So the post and courier know what went on in the private meeting then? And if so, why hasn’t it been leaked yet? Opinion portrayed as fact. IOW, fake news. And, lies and fake news ARE the enemy of the people. Paging Jim Acosta. Pick up the white discourtesy phone.
Trump WILL have some faults. Who the Hell doesn’t?
It is childish of the liberals to hold Trump to a perfect standard but not hold Obama or Clinton to any standard other than being a Democrat.
No, you’re wrong; its not that the Party hierarchy has misunderstood its base, but that they have actively despised the base. McCain, Bush Sr. and Jr. and to a lesser extent, Romney would say whatever they needed to in order to be accepted in the Democratic salons (Bob Dole was a fine exception to this rule - he was hated and couldn’t care less). To this day, I still have liberal friends who love Bush Sr. - why? Because he was totally ineffective, appointed the skunk David Souter to the Court, dissed the base except at election time, and in private assured them that he was not one of “those people” who were the only ones who stuck with him at election time (and only because of the nature of his opponent and the fact that he had been Reagan’s VP, no matter how later disloyal to his policies). Have you ever heard McCain, Romney or the execrable Bushes tear into a Dem the same way they go after Trump or his base? Never.
I believe a lot of Trump supporters are like me , right wing democrats who had their party taken over by socialists and communists and American haters, and we resent that.
As democrat Ronald Regan said, I didn't leave my party they left me.
So we vote against these socialists, communists and America haters by voting Republican. Tom
Trump is the first President with the heart and soul of a patriotic, common American man since Jackson.
We will never turn on him. We are him and we is us. He embodies the sound of the Republic in a way no human being has done since Washington
Trump is the first President with the heart and soul of a patriotic, common American man since Jackson.
We will never turn on him. We are him and he is us. He embodies the sound of the Republic in a way no human being has done since Washington
I am with him, unless and until he starts an apology tour with bowing to foreign heads of state.
[Luckily, I do not foresee that ever happening.]
McCain is esteemed for his service in the same way, to the same degree, and for the same reasons that Robert Murtha was esteemed for his service.
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