Donald Trump began the week facing accusations of treason over his embrace of Vladimir Putin. He ended it with a middle finger to his many critics by inviting the Russian autocrat to the White House.
The defiant gesture illustrated Trump’s confidence that he had weathered yet another political storm. While opponents had briefly hoped that what they saw as his disastrous showing alongside Putin in Helsinki would be the breaking point for his presidency, for American conservatives it appears to be business as usual. Some 79% of Republicans approved of his handling of the Russian president at the post-summit press conference, according to an Axios/ SurveyMonkey poll of 2,100 people. An even higher share, 85%, think the justice department investigation into Russia’s meddling in US elections is a distraction.
“You’ve got to really examine the flyover states,” said Anthony Scaramucci, the former White House communications director. “They couldn’t care less about what happened in Russia. They love this guy, they think this guy’s for them. These are low information emotional voters and they like what they see in the president. They think he’s working for them.”
The pattern follows earlier Trump crises where it was assumed that he would haemorrhage support. During the 2016 presidential election campaign, the release of an Access Hollywood video in which he boasted about groping women caused a Republican backlash, but a month later he was elected. A year ago he drew moral equivalence between white supremacists and antiracist activists, prompting an uproar, but again his base was unshaken.
The Teflon president has also survived allegations of infidelity with the pornographic film actor Stormy Daniels; a policy that separated immigrant parents from their children at the Mexican border; and endless scandals over falsehoods, conflicts of interest and racially divisive rhetoric. What did not kill him made him stronger. In Helsinki, however, the risks were unusually high.
After talks with only interpreters present that lasted more than two hours, Trump and Putin appeared together at the podium. Asked about his own intelligence agencies’ finding that Russia hacked the 2016 election, the US president declared: “I don’t see any reason why it would be. I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today.”
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