Differing views on past week of Trump’s presidency spotlight partisan divide

For Parson Hicks, a health care finance executive who supports President Donald Trump, this past week has felt a little like deja vu. Trump says something. His opponents howl and then predict, with certainty, a point of no return.

The last time this happened, she said, was in October with the notorious "Access Hollywood" recording of Trump talking lewdly about women. His opponents were sure he was finished. His supporters knew better.

"Let's be honest, the people who are currently outraged are the same people who have always been outraged," said Hicks, 35, a lifelong Republican who lives in Boston. "The media makes it seem like something has changed, when in reality nothing has."

It was a week of incessant tumult, when Trump tumbled into open warfare with some in his own party over his statements on the violence in Charlottesville, Virginia; business executives abandoned his advisory councils; top military leaders pointedly made statements denouncing racism in a way he did not; and his embattled chief strategist, Steve Bannon, stepped down. But around the country, Trump's supporters — and, according to many polls, Republicans more broadly — agreed with his interpretation of a swirl of racially charged events and stood with him amid still more clatter and churn.

Sixty-seven percent of Republicans said they approved of the president's response to the violence in Charlottesville last weekend, compared with just 10 percent of Democrats, according to a CBS News survey conducted over the past week.

It's an indication of what now seems an almost immutable law of the Trump presidency. There are signs that Trump's support among Republican leaders and some Republican voters is weakening. But in an increasingly tribal United States, with people on the left and the right getting information from different sources and seeing the same facts in different ways, it reflects the way Trump has become in many ways both symbol and chief agitator of a divided nation.

Moral outrage at Trump's response to Charlottesville continues to glow white hot, but it has a largely partisan tinge.

[Analysis: On Confederate monuments, the public stands with Trump]

From Hicks' perspective, the president simply pointed out a fact: Leftists bore some responsibility for the violence, too. Of course, Nazis and white supremacists are bad, she said. But she does not believe Trump has any affinity for them. He said so himself. But she is exasperated that a significant part of the country seems to think otherwise. The week's frenzied headlines read to her like bulletins from another planet.

"I feel like I am in a bizarro universe where no one but me is thinking logically," she said. "We have gone so off the rails of what this conversation is about."

Hicks, who is black and grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, welcomes the public soul-searching on the meaning of Confederate monuments. She believes that the statues were erected to intimidate black people and that they should be taken down. But instead of focusing on that, she sees opponents of Trump focusing on Trump.

"This is not about me as a black person, and my history," she said. "This is about this president and wanting to take him down because you don't like him."

Bannon's departure was more noise that didn't mean much, she said. "The show is going to go on."

Much of what powers the love for Trump among his core supporters is his boxer's approach to the political class in Washington and to the news media, a group that in their eyes has approached them with a double standard and a sneering sense of superiority for years.

Larry Laughlin, a retired businessman from a Minneapolis suburb, compares Trump to a high school senior who could "walk up to the table with the jocks and the cheerleaders and put them in their place." That is something that the "nerds and the losers, whose dads are unemployed and moms are working in the cafeteria," could never do. Trump may be rich, he said, but actually belonged at the nerd table.

"The guys who wouldn't like me wouldn't like Trump," he said. "The guys who were condescending to him were condescending to me.

"I feel like I'm watching my uncle up there. Where me and Chuck Schumer — that's like going to the dentist," he added, referring to the Democratic leader in the Senate.

Gregory Kline, 46, a lawyer in Severna Park, Maryland, who is a Republican, said he did not vote for Trump but understands that part of the president's support comes from fury at the left, particularly the media. When there is an attack by Muslim terrorists, for example, the media reaches for pundits who say most Muslims are good. But when it is a white supremacist, "every conservative is lumped in with him," he said.

"It's not that people are deaf and dumb and don't see it," he said of Trump's sometimes erratic behavior. "It's that they don't care. I've heard rational people I really respect make the craziest apologies for this president because they are sick of getting beat on and they are happy he's fighting back."

Is there anything Trump could do that would change the minds of his supporters? For the most loyal, probably not. A recent Monmouth University poll found that, of the current 41 percent of Americans who approve of the job he is doing, 61 percent say they cannot see Trump doing anything that would make them disapprove of him. (A similar share of the other side says there is nothing Trump could do — other than resigning — to get them to like him.)

But for many others, support is conditional. (Trump's poll numbers have dropped considerably since he took office in January.) Michael Dye, a 52-year-old engineer who is the treasurer for the Republican Party in Annapolis, Maryland, said he was "a bit stunned" that Trump had not focused more on condemning what was a large neo-Nazi march through the middle of the University of Virginia, Dye's alma mater.

"At best it is naive to think that the people showing up for the original protest were there simply because they were upset that this statue was being taken down," said Dye, who said he voted reluctantly for Trump.

Of the chant "Jews will not replace us," he said: "You can argue that it was 10 percent of the crowd. But there are those types in there and I've got a problem with that and I wish he'd specified that."

Even with his reservations, Dye said he would still vote for Trump. He wants his party to hold the reins and steer policy, and if Trump is the only route to that, he will take it.

[Analysis: Trump gives white supremacists an unequivocal boost]

Partisanship is now so deep that what we see depends entirely on who is looking. So when Trump said there had been "violence on both sides," Democrats — and some Republicans — heard a dangerous moral equivalence between neo-Nazis and the people who opposed them. But for many Trump supporters, his words appealed to a basic sense of fairness.

"Anyone who was fair-minded could see that there was violence on both sides," said John McIntosh, 76, who lives in New Bern, North Carolina, and voted for Trump. He said that did not excuse the driver of the car that killed a counterprotester and injured many others.

When those who were horrified tried to convince those who were not, it did not go well.

"Everybody is like, how can you not see it, he's a total white supremacist, a total Nazi," said Debra Skoog, a retired executive in Minneapolis and a lifelong Democrat who voted for Trump. "I just don't see it that way. I don't find his language as incriminating as some people do."

Yascha Mounk, a political scientist at Harvard University who writes about democracy, said partisanship in the United States today is dangerously deep.

"It's now at a stage where a lot of Americans have such a loyalty to their political tribe that they are willing to go along with deeply undemocratic behavior," he said. "If their guy says, 'I think we should push back the election for a few years because of a possible terrorist attack,' I fear that a significant part of the population would go along with it."

And in a polarized nation, many see a moment, full of passion on both sides, in which actions like taking down statues in the dead of night — as happened in Baltimore on Wednesday — are just bound to lead to more division.

"People who see this stuff going down the memory hole as quickly as it is happening feel unsettled by it," Kline said. "The left doesn't realize that the reaction a lot of people would have is to sit back and say, 'Wait a minute, what's going on here?'"

Susan Beachy contributed research.