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For those tens of millions of Americans who regard President Trump’s bull-in-a-china-shop decade of political life as a waking nightmare, what may be hardest to fathom is that tens of millions of their fellow citizens have viewed the very same spectacle and have said, in effect, “We are fine with it.”
And so it continues. A hundred days into Mr. Trump’s tumultuous second term, 42 percent of those in a recent New York Times/Siena poll not only approve of the job he is doing as president but describe his time in the White House so far as “exciting.”
True, only 43 percent of voters in the poll view him favorably, compared to 56 percent who view him unfavorably. Mr. Trump is also faring worse in the polls than any other modern president in his first 100 days.
And yet in the midst of the second-term chaos, Mr. Trump has suffered only a modest decline from the 48 percent of voters who viewed him favorably in the final Times/Siena poll before the November election. The numbers underscore that the durability of his appeal for his base cannot be ignored any more than Mr. Trump himself.
“He’s doing so much that the Democrats can’t keep up,” said Maria Libecki, a 68-year-old sales representative who was at the president’s rally in Warren, Mich., on Tuesday night. “It’s awesome.”
Whether or not Mr. Trump succeeds in his policy aims, he is once again the dominant force in American political life. Washington insiders could once shrug off his imperviousness to the laws of political gravity as a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence, like a two-headed cow. No longer. Now that same establishment has been forced to consider the possibility that, whatever Mr. Trump’s answers may be, many Americans think he is asking some of the right questions.
