This piece by David Lauter makes a point I hadn’t heard before. Trump’s been famous for a very long time and his “approval” rating has been pretty much the same. Since the 80s.
There’s a fact about Donald Trump that both devotees and detractors often ignore, and it’s key to understanding what likely will happen politically — and what won’t — if any of the several criminal investigations of him lead to an indictment:
Few people have ever been known so widely for so long.
How widely? In 1999, 16 years before he launched his campaign for president, almost 9 in 10 Americans already knew enough about Trump to have an opinion of him, Gallup found.
That year, Trump was as widely known as Al Gore, the sitting vice president, who was about to launch his fourth national campaign. Slightly more people had an opinion about Trump than about George W. Bush —the governor of Texas and son of a former president — who would defeat Gore in 2000.
By contrast, only about a third of Americans that year had an opinion of John McCain, who was already in his third term as a U.S. senator from Arizona and would be the GOP nominee in 2008.
As for the president at the time, almost all Americans had an opinion of Bill Clinton in 1999, the seventh year of his presidency. But as late as January of 1992, when he was already running for the job, a majority of Americans said they had never heard of him.
Trump’s celebrity dates back at least to 1987 and the publication of the “Art of the Deal.” He has been among the nation’s most widely recognized people for four decades — longer than a majority of Americans have been alive.
Among presidents in the past half a century, only Ronald Reagan approached Trump’s level of near-universal name recognition before winning the White House. To find someone as widely known without a prior run for president, one would have to go back to Dwight Eisenhower.
And unlike Eisenhower (and most other celebrities), Trump has almost always inspired sharply split opinions — “master builder” versus “thick-fingered vulgarian.”
The 1999 Gallup survey, for example, found opinion about Trump divided pretty much as it’s split today: 47% of Americans viewed him unfavorably, 41% favorably. (Currently, 55% have an unfavorable view of him, compared with 41% who see him favorably, according to the average of polls maintained by FiveThirtyEight.)
If an indictment happens — a New York grand jury considering charges against Trump meets again on Monday — the long familiarity that Americans have with him will shape the political impact. The same is true of the other cases in the list of criminal investigations he faces.
The political environment around Trump has two central realities: He remains unpopular among most Americans. And he remains very popular among a large segment of the Republican Party.
The latest Monmouth University poll, released Tuesday, found that among Republican voters, 71% had a favorable view of Trump, compared with 21% who had an unfavorable one.
Like several other recent polls, the Monmouth survey also showed Trump widening his lead over his main 2024 GOP rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who appears to have faded as attention has focused back on Trump. Among all Republicans in the survey, 41% picked Trump as their favorite and 27% chose DeSantis.
Trump’s lead was especially large among the roughly 4 in 10 Republican voters who identify as strong supporters of the MAGA movement, named after Trump’s “Make American great again” slogan. MAGA backers supported Trump over DeSantis by almost 50 points, the survey found.
If New York prosecutors announce charges against Trump in their case involving hush-money payments to a porn star, that Republican viewpoint isn’t likely to shift.
The same goes for the other investigations Trump faces, including a grand jury probe in Atlanta involving alleged interference in Georgia‘s 2020 election, and two federal investigations being handled by special counsel Jack Smith into Trump’s involvement in the Jan. 6 riot and his failure to turn over documents held at Mar-a-Lago that were subpoenaed by the government.
Most Republican voters don’t trust officials of big, Democratic cities. Nor do they trust the Justice Department. And they’ve mostly made their peace with Trump’s behavior.
At least in the short term, an indictment could cause Trump’s current advantage among Republicans to grow, Sarah Longwell, a Republican strategist and longtime Trump critic said this week on her podcast.
“It centers all the media attention on him,” she said. “It forces all of the other candidates to rally around Trump. The whole of the Republican Party may not be in agreement that Donald Trump is the best candidate for 2024, but there is going to be broad agreement that ‘he’s being persecuted by members of the deep state and our political enemies, and therefore we must defend Trump.’”
Over time, however, the outcome of the primaries will turn on how many GOP voters say that they admire the former president but feel that it’s time for the party to move on to a leader with less baggage.
The challenge for DeSantis, as well as Trump’s other rivals, including former Vice President Mike Pence and former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, remains what it has always been — to convince enough GOP voters that nominating Trump will simply hand the election to President Biden.
There are clearly some voters in the party receptive to that argument. As Amy Walter, editor of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, recently noted, multiple polls have shown a slow decline since Trump left office in the share of Republicans who view him positively — not a major shift, but a steady erosion.
No one knows whether the instinct to rally around Trump will outweigh the fear Republicans have of another lost election. We probably won’t know until the campaign is more fully engaged.
The consequences for a general election are clearer: Most Americans dislike Trump, and an indictment will not make that better.
Winning the presidency with majority disapproval is possible — Trump did it in 2016 because most Americans also disliked his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton. He beat her among those who disliked both of them, and that allowed him to carry just enough states to win the presidency despite losing the popular vote.
Maybe he can do that again. But counting on that lightning to strike twice didn’t work in 2020, and barring an economic collapse or other calamity, there’s no strong reason to think it would work any better in 2024 — Biden’s current mediocre poll ratings notwithstanding.
What Trump needs in order to increase his chance for a win is to pick up new voters. An indictment might increase the enthusiasm of his core supporters, but being enthusiastic doesn’t give anyone an additional ballot, and turnout among his base is already very high.
Since the start of Trump’s political career, people on the left and the right have held mirror-image fantasies of a dramatic event causing a sudden shift in how Americans look at him.
On the left, it’s the fantasy of the silver bullet — the circumstance so damning that it causes Trump’s supporters to abandon him en masse. On the right, it’s the belief that Trump’s opponents will overstep so egregiously that Americans will rally around the former president, propelling him to majority support.
The Access Hollywood tape, Charlottesville, Jan. 6 and two impeachments should have disabused people of both ideas, but both have resurfaced as speculation about an imminent indictment has mounted.
I can’t speak for the left but I stopped believing the big “scandal” would separate him from his cult sometime around the Access Hollywood tape. If that didn’t do it, nothing will. By now anyone who thinks that will happen just isn’t paying attention.
What I do think is that he’s a weak general election candidate. He’s been weak since 2016,k 2020 was even weaker and I suspect he’ll be even weaker still in 2024. He’ll still have at least his 40%. After all, Herbert Hoover got 28% in the middle of the Great Depression. Partisanship has always been powerful. But I think he’s the weakest of the lot and the next generation of weirdos they’ve created have some skills I wouldn’t want to see put to use.