Thanks, Donald Trump, for proving us right today about your Russia scandal

| 4:13 pm EDT July 7, 2017
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No one on the left or right ever seems to want to believe this, but a President doesn’t sink or swim based on how much his base loves him or how much his detractors hate him. Neither of those groups ever comes close to being fifty percent of the country. So a President’s approval rating, and this his fate, is decided by the people in the middle who don’t like or care about politics, but still get called by opinion pollsters. And today was huge in terms of where that goes next.

Donald Trump finally held his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. This came after Trump’s own base has spent the past several months loudly insisting that his Russia scandal isn’t a real thing, even as Trump’s detractors have spent those same several months loudly insisting that Trump is a treasonous Russian puppet. The people in the middle of this hear both sides of this, but they can go either way on it. First of all, they don’t care that much. Most (not all) people in the middle are there because they don’t believe politics and elections make that much of a difference to begin with. They only take a side when there’s an obvious side to take.

I could spend ten paragraphs laying out in detail why Donald Trump’s base is no more than 15% of the country, but I won’t. Either you instinctively understand that bases and detractors are both small-ish minorities within the overall population, or you live inside a fictional bubble where only the base and the detractors exist. But the cold hard fact is that Trump’s current 35% approval rating consists of his 15% base and another 20% of people in the middle who are still giving him the benefit of the doubt. And that’s why something like today’s meeting matters so much.

After Trump’s meeting with Putin, the Russian government announced that Russia didn’t hack the election, and then Trump’s own White House announced the same. It’s the kind of clear-eyed moment that even the people in the middle, who pay as little attention to politics as possible, and who have no interest in complex or obtuse evidence coming from either side, can look at and say “Wow, Trump really is a Russian puppet.” Today will carve a little deeper into that 20% passive support that he can still lose and, his approval rating will drop a bit. And as I’ve been explaining since November, Trump will sink or swim based on his approval rating; that’s the only way these things ever work. So Trump helped the Resistance today by playing the puppet in a way that even those with their eyes closed could see. If you’re a regular reader, feel free to support Palmer Report