I am more interested in the question of whether or not Putin's role as Trump's obvious... let's go with "dom" for today, can be expected to have any electoral effects. The theme for today, then, is the potential for partisan tides in elections. Gallup has had Trump's approval rating on a bit of an uptick, currently at 43%, which is still not good, but a bit better. If you pay too much attention to punditry, though, you would think that the last week was total and utter disaster for Trump, and by extension, the GOP, for how obviously Trump let himself, well, go read Will Hurd's op-ed for the New York Times.
Here's the problem. Does that general storyline sound familiar? Have we heard that before? Have Trump's numbers ever plummeted? Have we ever really seen GOP defections at the elite level? OK, Hurd went after Trump, but like the title says, what's he gonna do?
What will Hurd do? (See what I did there?) Nothing. You see, according to that wonderful news source, The Onion, Congress passed a resolution blocking itself from doing anything about Trump. Ever. That one might as well be true. So might this one, leaving the world to wonder, as in this one. I don't think I could get through the Trump Presidency without The Onion.
This is a ritual that we have seen before. Trump does something stupid, vile and horrendous that would have been unthinkable for any past president of the modern era. It is so stupid and vile that even a few members of his own party feel compelled to speak out. What concrete actions to they take? None. Why not? Because elections are zero-sum events. I have written about zero-sum interactions rather a lot, and I wrote a series about zero-sum politics about Trump, to my knowledge, long before most pundits caught on to the importance of it to his thinking. Most things in economics aren't zero-sum. That's why capitalism works, and why mercantilism is stupid and wrong. Elections, though, are zero-sum. In order for Republicans to do anything to Trump, they have to hurt their own party, and that means helping Democrats. That's why none of them will really do it.
It would risk a partisan tide in November. None of them are willing to do that. So, we go through this familiar ritual in which a few "brave" Republicans come out and criticize Trump for something that would have gotten his stupid, vile, treasonous ass run out of town on a rail if either it were just a few years ago, or more importantly, if he were a Democrat. However, this stuff will be tamped down by November. The GOP may very well be on its way to elevating Vladimir Putin to the same stature as Margaret Thatcher in its mythology. Why? Because to do otherwise would be to risk increasing the size of a partisan tide in 2018.
We have seen this before. Wasn't Charlottesville supposed to be a turning point? How many of those have there been? I've lost count. Here's an oldie but a goodie. Remember when Trump lied about saying he taped his conversations with Comey? Remember how insane that was? When Trump pulled that act, I posted this. What I wrote was that pretty soon after the event, you would forget about Trump's insane lie about secretly recording the FBI Director, and you needed to keep in mind how insane it is that a lie so insane could be forgotten because it would be buried under so many more insane lies.
When was the last time you thought about Trump lying about secretly recording the FBI Director? It's been a while, right? Why? Because Trump keeps doing more and more crazy, vile things, and like I told you, it would get buried amid more crazy shit. That's just how vile Trump is.
How bad was it that Trump sold out the country to Putin, and will continue to do so? Well, compare that to the fact that he handed national security secrets to the Russians, for nothing, within months of taking office. And his polling at Gallup has, if anything, ticked slightly up with the economy booming, while the GOP demonstrates that they don't care what he does. At all. We've been through this. There is nothing Trump could ever do to get Republicans to abandon him. Ever.
What does this mean for the effects of last week's Putin shenanigans? It means that they won't amount to anything in November.
We have models. Political science works. Yes, the actual political science forecasting models, as opposed to the polls, even got the 2016 election right. Alan Abramowitz's "Time for a Change" model, my favorite, correctly called it for the GOP, even if Alan himself (along with yours truly, admittedly), lost the faith, so to speak. The economy, presidential approval... these kinds of things matter. What about a president who subordinates himself to a hostile foreign power? We have never seen it before, so there is no variable for it in our political science models, but the only way it could operate is through presidential approval. Trump's approval rating hasn't gone down. Why not? Two things-- the economy, and absolute, unwavering support from his own party's leaders (congressional Republicans, Fox News, etc.). Trump's approval rating cannot go down below the basic floor of support, short of the economy crashing, or something like that. That means that nothing he does can negatively affect him, or the Republican Party, in terms of the immediate electoral future.
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