Five Reasons Why Republicans Won't Abandon Trump Like They Ditched Nixon [View all]

[ehrnst]

Written about an anticipation of GOP reaction to the release of the Mueller report and possible obstruction charges, reasons 2-5 are relevant to predicting the reactions of Republicans to allegations raised in an impeachment investigation - especially for anyone who believes that allegations revealed in a Democrat-led impeachment could possibly turn many who still support Trump after all this time against him, as Republicans did Nixon.

2. Nixon was a lame-duck president; Trump’s definitely not. When the buzzards began circling Richard Nixon’s presidency, he was well into his second term, and faced a Democratic-controlled Congress that was not about to let him off the hook for any Watergate-related revelations. By the time definitive evidence of obstruction of justice emerged, the House was already considering articles of impeachment, and Democrats held 56 Senate seats. Trump is already running for reelection in what bids fair to become a savagely polarized 2020 campaign, and his party controls the Senate and thus can make (and almost certainly already has made) his removal from office via the impeachment process all but impossible. To the extent that Trump’s entire presidency is the product of some of the most intense partisanship in living memory, and his entire personality is based on his identity as a “winner,” the odds of him ever resigning in the face of attacks from Democrats seem very low. And Republicans know that.

3. Trump is a lot more popular among today’s Republicans than Nixon was among yesterday’s. People remember that Richard Nixon was reelected in 1972 by a huge landslide, but was forced to resign less than two years later. But it’s less clearly remembered that in between the two events his popularity steadily dropped — among Republicans as well as Democrats and independents. .....the resignation of his vice-president, Spiro Agnew, after being caught accepting bribes; growing public hostility to delays in ending the Vietnam War; and the beginning of a recession that interrupted a long period of economic growth. By the time Nixon was forced to resign, his approval rating overall was a terrible 24 percent, and just 50 percent among Republicans. Trumps has never fallen below 79% among Republicans, and is currently at 88%.

4. The Republican Party is more monochromatic ideologically than it was during Watergate. Many conservative Republicans defended Nixon long after the public had soured on him. That gave him some Republican support, but in those days of a strong moderate and even liberal wing of the GOP, it wasn’t enough to save him.

5. Trump’s whole approach to politics incentivizes partisan combat, not fact-based investigations. Whether or not Donald Trump is a symptom of partisan and ideological polarization on the right, or its cause (he’s almost certainly both), we have long passed the point at which Republicans are particularly concerned about whether his words are truthful or his behavior is lawful. If we’ve all become somewhat desensitized to presidential lying, it’s particularly true of fellow partisans whose daily bread is Fox & Friends, and who glory in how crazy his lies drive journalists and Democrats. Those who can remain calm when their president makes up a myth of “millions of illegal votes” for his opponent in 2016 because he can’t accept the fact that he lost the popular vote, and routinely threatens his enemies with extra-constitutional vengeance, are not suddenly going to dump him just because Robert Mueller concludes he probably had malign motives for firing James Comey.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/04/gop-abandon-trump-like-nixon.html