There have not been many points at which Donald Trump’s view of the world and his base’s view of the world are out of alignment. This is mostly because each view is rooted in the same core sensibility: Someone is out to get them — elites or immigrants or elite immigrants or whoever — and they must go on the offense against their opponents. It’s easy to slot pretty much any issue into that framework, and Trump has proven exceptionally adept at doing so.

When conflicts do arise, they are usually resolved quickly with either Trump or (far more often) his base simply shifting their baseline as necessary to bring the two perspectives back into alignment. This is pretty easy because there are few issues on which views are so strongly held that one side or the other can’t simply shrug and move to something else.

When Trump has in the past insisted that up is down, his base has often simply agreed to adjust their priors. On rarer occasion, it has worked the other way. Trump’s first administration did a legitimately good job facilitating the development of vaccines to address the coronavirus, for example, but when Trump’s hostility to his science advisors metastasized into opposition to science and vaccines broadly, Trump meekly stopped trying to celebrate his accomplishment. His base was still celebrating and voting for him, so let the woke history books worry about memorializing the time he oversaw a scientific success.

Then came Jeffrey Epstein.

On the subject of the deceased sexual predator, Trump and his base are firmly entrenched in very different positions. To his base, Epstein represents the most direct evidence that rich elites engage in deviant immoral behavior — a fragment of the QAnon worldview made manifest. To Trump, though, Epstein is a guy who he used to be good friends with and who he used to hang out with and who … well, let’s just change the subject, shall we? That’s old news, everyone! Why don’t we talk about what Barack Obama did* instead!

This tactic has worked in the past. If there is something that Trump doesn’t want to talk about, something that reflects on him poorly and which threatens to create one of those rifts between him and his base, he and his allies have generally done a good job not talking about it. Even on Epstein, his most powerful ally in the media, Fox News, has been dutifully talking not about Epstein but instead about Barack Obama and that wily Joe Biden, the president who cunningly sought to destroy Donald Trump while simultaneously being so inept that all of his presidential actions should be considered suspect.

Again, this has worked in the past. Fox News buried discussion of Trump’s liaison with Stormy Daniels and of the details of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s work, with Fox viewers subsequently viewing themselves as particularly well informed even as they demonstrated that they were not.

This time, though, it’s not working as well. In Washington Post-SSRS polling published this morning, we see that, while Republicans report spending less time tracking Epstein news than independents or Democrats (whose appetite for Epstein stories is Miyazakian). But a majority are still tracking the story.

And, while Republicans are generous in their assessment of how Trump’s handling the situation, there are clear tells that they are not thrilled about the whole situation. The Post poll shows that Republicans (and MAGA Republicans) are more likely to approve of Trump’s handling of the situation than to oppose it, 4 in 10 of each group say they aren’t exactly sure if they approve — which, translating from partisan poll-speak, means they disapprove but are wary of saying they disapprove of Trump.

A similar phenomenon emerges when people were asked if they think the legendary “Epstein files” contain information that would be embarrassing for Trump. Most Americans (and a huge majority of giddy Democrats) think they do. But only a small fraction of Republicans agree … though a an additional 4 in 10 say they aren’t really sure if the material about Epstein might inculpate the president in whom they’ve invested so much confidence.

It’s important to point out that Donald Trump is not making any of this easier for himself. I don’t think the Epstein thing will persist for months to come; there’s only so much that can be explored and discussed. Then again, I wouldn’t have expected it to last this long. But Trump keeps doing things that revive it, from his transparent call for the release of an extremely limited set of information to the weird, unhelpful outreach from his former personal attorney (and now deputy attorney general) to Epstein’s collaborator, Ghislaine Maxwell.

Trump’s desperation to get his base to ignore this whole thing is palpable. His efforts to throw out shiny balls for his supporters to chase is painfully obvious, like a five year-old doing a magic trick. He tried to strong-arm Rupert Murdoch into killing the Wall Street Journal’s story about a letter he (allegedly) penned for Epstein’s 50th birthday. It didn’t work, for which you gotta hand it to the guy who also owns Fox News.

But this is dangerous terrain for Trump. If others on the right come to see the Epstein story as a better generator of attention than standing with the (lame duck!) president, there are incentives on both sides of the aisle to keep the story alive. There is a path — a narrow and tricky path — for someone else to become the champion of the “someone’s out to get you” narrative, someone who can point at Trump as being in bed with the scoundrels he was supposed to be fighting.

Trump’s obvious unease with the Epstein situation may well center on what he and his friend were actually up to back in the day — a possibility that seems more likely with every over the top protest from the president. But it may also be that he senses that this fissure is widening, not closing.

* Barack Obama didn’t do anything.

Late Friday evening, the Wall Street Journal published a poll that fell solidly in the affirming-but-not-surprising category: the Democratic Party is viewed more unfavorably now than at any point in the past 35 years. The Democratic Party is viewed more negatively than either the Republican Party or Donald Trump, with the Journal’s report noting that Republicans are also given the advantage on “most issues that decide elections.”

And yet! In the same poll, more respondents indicated they planned to vote for the Democrat in next year’s House elections than indicated they planned to vote for the Republican — a 3-point advantage that isn’t statistically significant but which belies the idea that Democrats are in complete free-fall.

It’s easy to over-read one poll result (he said, clearing his throat). But this comports with a pattern that’s been evident since at least 2021 — and probably since well before 2015. To wit: Parties are something to run against, not alongside.

I am not offering this as a particularly novel observation. The travails of the U.S.’s major parties have been well-documented. Julia Azari’s 2016 articulation of our system being comprised of strong partisanship and weak parties remains essential to understanding where we are and how we got here. I’m simply highlighting the extent to which party and candidates diverge in the moment and for Democrats.

A similar divergence on the right was resolved when one candidate, Trump, consumed the party entirely. He did so by running against the party whose presidential nomination he sought, positioning himself as something other than a traditional Republican and thereby appealing to people skeptical of the institution itself.

Similar efforts on the left have been less successful, in part because there’s been less hostility toward the Democratic Party among Democrats. But running against the party has yielded successes: Bernie Sanders’ surges in 2016 and 2020, for example, and the emergence of viable (at least in some places) candidates who describe themselves as Democratic Socialists.

As I’ve noted before, it’s not an accident that the most vibrant expressions of opposition to Trump have emerged from people who sit at a distance from the party; Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s barnstorming events around the country are engaging in a way that the Democratic Party isn’t. Being able to be critical of the party — and to exist outside of the constraints that travel along with its money and resources — is valuable.

It’s through this lens that we should consider the Wall Street Journal poll. Or, because we can dig into the details more easily, a new poll from the Journal’s corporate sibling: Fox News.

I know, I know. Fox News as a media entity cannot generally be relied upon to offer a useful, objective view of the world. But Fox News’s polling arm can be — to the degree that it comes under fire from Trump and even from Fox News personalities themselves. The poll is conducted by firms that generally poll for candidates on either side of the partisan divide and the result is consistently reliable.

He said, clearing his throat again.

So let’s look at the Fox poll. Let’s start by noting that, for all of the Democratic Party’s problems, Trump’s not doing so hot either. More than 4 in 10 Americans view the job he’s doing with strong disapproval. Even among Republicans, only about half view his performance with strong approval. Among Democrats, 8 in 10 view him strongly negatively.

As you might expect, given those numbers, Trump’s approval on specific issues is also generally underwater (meaning he is viewed more negatively than positively). In Fox’s poll, he’s only net-positive on “border security” — an issue that is distinct from “immigration,” where his approval is net-negative. Among independents, there’s a 24-point downward shift between net approval on the border and net approval on immigration.

In this poll, too, the Democratic Party is viewed crummily. But there are some caveats.

One is that the total favorability (strongly favorable plus somewhat favorable) ratings are about the same for both parties. The central difference is that Republicans view the Republican Party more strongly favorably than Democrats view the Democratic Party.

Republicans look at the Republican Party, slowly digesting deep within Trump’s belly, and think, this looks good to me. Democrats, on the other hand, look at their party and express much less warmth.

And yet! Asked which party was preferred on a range of issues, it was Democrats who consistently had an advantage. Even on a range of issues selected by the Fox News team that works with the pollsters to develop the questions, there were more places where Democrats had a distinct advantage than ones where the Republicans did.

At the risk of being overly cute, I’ll note that the responses presented to respondents on these questions asked them to choose between “The Democrats” and “The Republicans,” rather than to the parties themselves.

A more important point comes from CNN pollster Ariel Edwards-Levy, who noted on social media that the Journal poll gives Republicans a much bigger advantage on inflation than is shown in the Fox one. Her informed explanation is that this is a function of the Journal poll having offered people the ability to choose “neither” Democrats nor Republicans. That option was selected by nearly a quarter of respondents in the case of inflation.

Forced to pick in the Fox News poll, respondents kept picking the Democrats — or both parties equally. This is not fairly interpreted as a sign that people reject Democratic candidates or policies, nor, clearly, is it an indicator that Trump has gobbled down the American public in the way he devoured the GOP.

There are still significant advantages to political parties. That D or R next to a name on a ballot continues to serve as an effective indicator of what the candidate stands for, if not a complete one. The question at the moment appears to center on what the Democratic Party itself stands for — particularly among Democrats. Consider the results when Fox asked respondents which party had a “clear plan” for addressing America’s problems.

Eight in 10 Republicans said their party did. Only half of Democrats agreed.

There’s one last point worth making here. It seems revealing that the Wall Street Journal described its poll results as showing a GOP advantage on “most issues that decide elections.” Beyond the ludicrousness of knowing what issues will decide future elections (consider what people in 2019 would have expected to dominate the 2020 contest), this is editorializing masquerading as summation. Issues decide elections because they are made salient to voters, either through circumstance or cajoling. There is not some set of eternal issues that are necessarily compelling to people casting ballots.

A Democratic Party that effectively cajoles voters into centering specific issues in their electoral decision-making is a party that is perceived as having a clear plan and a party that wins elections. If they continue to do a poor job on this front, Democratic candidates will be well served to run against or apart from the party as much as possible.

Story one: As he left the White House this morning on his way to the golf club he owns in Scotland — the ones he owns in Bedminster, N.J. or Sterling, Va. apparently no longer cutting it — President Trump took questions from reporters.

One asked about the meeting between his former personal attorney (now deputy attorney general) Todd Blanche and Ghislaine Maxwell, convicted accomplice to Jeffrey Epstein’s predations. But Trump didn’t want to talk much about that.

“People should really focus on how well the country is doing,” he replied, “or they should focus on the fact that Barack Hussein Obama led a coup” or, he continued, people should focus on other people who were linked to Epstein.

Story two: At about the same time that Trump was leaving the executive mansion, his friend Maria Bartiromo was rising to his defense yet again on her ostensibly business-oriented cable-news show. In this case, it was about how unfair the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election was to Trump.

“People were not going and taking jobs in his first administration,” Bartiromo said. “He wasn’t able to get talented and the right people in the right jobs. Remember, all those celebrities wouldn’t sing at his, you know, at big events, at his inauguration, Hollywood.”

These two stories are the same story.

Before I explain, I’m obligated to rebut the claims made by Trump and his advocate. Trump’s assertion that the country is doing well is subjective, certainly, though it’s objectively true that Obama didn’t “lead a coup.” The claim that Trump had trouble staffing his first administration is silly, given that he had a more broadly respected crew at hand then than he does now. It was true that he had trouble finding good staff for his 2016 campaign, which is how he ended up with Paul Manafort working for free, etc. But that had nothing to do with Russia. At least, not in the way Bartiromo means.

But dishonesty and spin are not the only commonality. More important is the common sense that Trump is aggrieved, that he’s a victim of forces outside of his control. It is unfair, in Trump’s eyes, that he is being pestered about his past associations with a man understood to be one of America’s most notorious sex offenders, despite all the good he’s doing for the country! It is unfair, in Bartiromo’s, that Hollywood was snookered into thinking Trump was bad because of a baseless Russia probe, so much so that he had to suffer the indignity of having third-tier performers celebrate his presidency (-ies).

Trump’s sense that everyone should be fawning over him was encapsulated succinctly (and not entirely intentionally) in an Axios report this week that Americans weren’t impressed “aren’t impressed” by Trump’s second term efforts. “In fact,” the report suggested, “they seem tired of all the winning.”

So do the Washington Generals.

The issue isn’t that Americans aren’t aware of what Trump’s doing. It’s that they don’t like it. New Gallup data shows Trump with dire approval ratings, particularly among independents. On no issue does at least half the country approve of what Trump’s doing, including on his purported strengths like immigration and the economy. On each of those, his approval is below 40 percent.

Trump is used to existing in a space where he’s enormously popular and can do no wrong, the bubble that he brought with him to D.C. in January. Within that bubble, the Russia probe was unfounded, as per Bartiromo and her peers. Within that bubble, Trump is popular and advocating for America — and any unpopularity or opposition is inexplicable.

Within that bubble, Trump’s approval ratings are skyrocketing.

Mike Johnson on Trump: "His approval ratings are skyrocketing. CNN had a story a day or two ago — he was at a 90 percent approval rating! There's never been a president that high." pic.twitter.com/46VEufMotr

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 18, 2025

Outside of that bubble, that CNN poll put Trump’s approval at 42 percent, not 90 percent. It was only close to 90 percent among Republicans, the primary denizens of that bubble.

Trump’s insecurity is legendary and long-standing. One way to look at his success in politics, in fact, is to understand that his insecurity allowed him to tap into the broader insecurity of American conservatives.

It’s a group that sees Whites and men and religious people as some of the groups facing the most discrimination in the U.S., not — as is often the case — as the beneficiaries of discriminatory actions.

Trump’s rise in the 2016 Republican primary was often attributed to “economic insecurity,” but what that meant in practice was often a bitterness at the idea that people in big cities were successful and admired in a way that Trump’s base often wasn’t. There was a desire to put “the elites” in their place and Trump, who spent decades fuming at the success he saw across the river in Manhattan, was willing to put his celebrity and wealth in play to help them achieve that goal.

What’s changed since then (beyond Trump’s inability to separate himself from the “elites” in the Epstein case) is that the right-wing bubble — a bubble of positive reinforcement and ego-stroking — has swelled and strengthened. One can live one’s entire life in a universe where Trump is hitting all the right marks and delivering a string of successes for America, in part because weak points are ignored. Trump has made a world in which that lingering insecurity can be pushed out of mind: They are winning and the elites are losing!

The eternal challenge with that bubble, though, is that it isn’t reality and lots of people still live in the real world. It’s a world where popular singers shy away from Trump not because they heard that the FBI was investigating Russia interference but because he’s sending people to foreign prisons for the crime of having brown skin and tattoos. It’s a world where people want to know how close he was to Jeffrey Epstein and know that the allegations about Obama are silly.

Trump’s trying to broaden the bubble, policing what universities teach and what artificial intelligence systems say. But reality is stubborn, stubborn enough that most Americans see what he’s doing and disapprove. Every so often, that reality pierces the bubble, generating the friction seen in the two stories this morning.

I am a sucker for analyses of politics by age. The reason for this is lengthy but uncomplicated: I have spent a lot of time thinking and talking about generations — I wrote a book on the subject! — and think the intersection of age and politics tells us a great deal about the political moment.

I was therefore eager to dig into new data from Pew Research Center’s National Public Opinion Reference Survey, looking at party identification across a range of demographics. Age, predictably, was one of them.

Perhaps the most interesting finding centered on the gap in partisan identity by age and gender. You can see the raw numbers below. Notice that, in every age group, men are more likely to identify as Republican (and Republican-leaning independents) than as Democrats. In nearly every age group, women are more likely to identify as Democrats (and leaning independents).

Notice, too, that the differences among men by age are smaller than the differences among women. If we look at net identity (below, as the percentage who identify as Republican/leaners minus those who identify as Democrats/leaners), we see that younger women are the most Democratic. Because of that, the partisan gap between men and women is widest among the youngest respondents.

As has been discussed, including by me, this is the terrain after a rightward shift among young men — and young non-White men in particular. You can see how, over the past five years of NPOR data, the biggest drift has happened among the youngest Americans.

The new Pew data also breaks out partisanship by birth decade, so I figured this was a good opportunity to see what the longer term trend had been on that metric. Using the General Social Survey, I created these charts showing the shift in partisan identification (including leaners) over the past 50 years by birth decade. I overlaid the Pew data where available.

A few things stand out, including the much sharper shift among those born in the 1980s in the Pew data. It’s also noticeable how sharply the partisanship of those born in the 1940s to 1960s — boomers, mostly — shifted to the right in the 1980s. On average, those groups shifted more than 20 points to the right between 1980 and 1992. It wasn’t just that they got more Republican as they got older, as the old adage predicts. It was that they all got more Republican in the same time period.

That suggests that the shift was a function of something other than age, like the popularity of Ronald Reagan. It’s probably not fair, though, to attribute the rightward shift among younger Americans in the moment to Donald Trump. Perhaps it is to some degree. But perhaps it is the unpopularity of Joe Biden, or the lingering effects of covid or the collapse of our shared understanding of reality. Time will (presumably) tell.

We should also probably not assume that any positive effects for the GOP from Trump’s presidency might last among younger Americans. YouGov polling indicates that, since he took office in January, his favorability has plunged the most with younger adults.

You can see a shift back to the left among the youngest respondents to the NPOR survey, too — just a little tick back away from GOP.

And that was measured less than six months into Trump’s effort to overhaul the entire country.

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Update: One nice thing about publishing my own analyses is that I can add to them if I am so inclined. And, here, I am so inclined! In short, I took the decade/party data from the GSS and also broke it out by gender.

There isn’t enough data from younger Americans yet to read a whole lot into this (since the sample sizes among the youngest respondents is pretty small), but there you go.

Last week, as the question of President Trump’s relationship with Jefrrey Epstein occupied the public’s attention, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard rolled out the shiniest ball at her disposal: Actually, she (and, immediately afterward, her boss) claimed, the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election was an attempted coup by Barack Obama.

It was not, as multiple investigations not undertaken by Trump allies have established. The purported evidence undergirding Gabbard’s new claim was, as I wrote earlier this week, unconvincing cherry-picking that relies centrally on dishonestly conflating “Russia didn’t hack election systems” with “Russia didn’t engage in any electronic influence efforts.” Just go read the thing I wrote before if you want more details. No point in writing it again!

On Wednesday, Gabbard offered up another previously classified document aimed at casting the Russia probe as partisan. “New evidence has emerged,” she wrote on X, “that “of the most egregious weaponization and politicization of intelligence in American history.” Ignoring the irony of that sentence in that post, Gabbard linked to that new evidence: a report assessing (among other things) that the claim Vladimir Putin wanted Trump to win in 2016 was weaker than presented in a report created by the intelligence community in the waning days of Obama’s presidency.

What Gabbard’s been doing isn’t complicated. She’s plucking isolated comments from intelligence agents and using them to suggest that the story that was told about Russia and Trump was false and offered in bad faith. Importantly, there’s little evidence offered to provide counter-narrative. There’s no methodical construction of an argument that Obama and his aides sought to impugn Trump, just a declaration that they did so with little slivers of doubt jammed in where possible to justify the broad claim.

One key target audience — Trump’s base — needs little more than that. Consider this post from Gabbard, one of a series aimed at spreading the baseless claims on social media:

LIE: Putin and the Russian Government helped Trump win the 2016 election

TRUTH: President Obama, former Director of the CIA John Brennan, and others fabricated the Russia Hoax, suppressed intelligence showing Putin was preparing for a Clinton victory, manufactured findings from… pic.twitter.com/nkaLDMrUSv

— DNI Tulsi Gabbard (@DNIGabbard) July 23, 2025

How is it a lie that the Russians helped Trump when even the report declassified and shared by Gabbard today documents the overlap of declining poll numbers for Hillary Clinton with the release on WikiLeaks of the material stolen by Russian actors? How is it subsequently “truth” that the investigation was “fabricated”? How does any evidence that Putin still thought Clinton would win run contrary to the idea that he and Russia sought to aid Trump?

Never mind, of course, the perennial problem with this idea that the Russia probe was meant to drive Trump from power: that the investigation began well before Trump was elected and that it never resulted in a threat to Trump’s presidency, thanks in part to Republicans holding power in the House for the first two years. The Obama administration didn’t try to block Trump from winning the 2016 election. In fact, the only point at which it put its thumb on the scale, however intentionally, was then-FBI Director James Comey’s last-minute announcement that an investigation into Hillary Clinton was being revived.

Anyway, none of this is really the point. The point, instead, is that the “new evidence” Gabbard presents, that she offers as a fair assessment that had been kept out of the public eye, is not. At the top of a thread in which Gabbard denounces the idea that the intelligence committee assessment as not being independent sits a link to a report that was explicitly not independent, but created by House Republicans loyal to Trump.

You don’t have to take my word for it. Just The News, a media site founded by Trump ally John Solomon, reports that the document shared by Gabbard was “was produced in 2018 during the 116th Congress under the leadership of then-Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.).” A product of the House Intelligence Committee, it was submitted to the CIA where it lay stagnant — until it recently became useful to elevate as an ostensibly buried analysis of what occurred during the Obama administration.

It’s a bit like taking a cheap bracelet and burying it in the dirt, only to dig it up later and display it to a marveling crowd, offering it for sale at a premium. It’s long been the case that uncovered information grabs the public’s (and the media’s) attention more vigorously than similar admissions. Gabbard’s making lemonade out of what was until now a lemon.

That the report centers on the idea that Putin wasn’t really trying to help Trump win is itself a tell. This is the thing that frustrated Trump the most from the outset, this idea that Putin had a role in a victory that Trump presented as a function of his own tremendous popularity. Whether Putin and Russia intervened solely to gum up American politics or specifically to hurt Clinton didn’t really matter from the perspective of the intelligence community as it sought to figure out how serious the threat was. But it sure mattered to Trump.

We’ve seen the product of the intelligence community’s work and we’ve seen various assessments of that product and of that work. We’ve seen Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team articulate what Russia did and how Trump’s team welcomed the effort as it happened. We’ve seen a bipartisan Senate committee reinforce and expand on that articulation.

Well, we have anyway. Trump and his allies — including Gabbard and including Nunes, now the head of Trump’s media company — have gone to great lengths to ensure that those things aren’t seen or, at least, aren’t treated seriously. Instead they see baseless, sloppy claims that puts the blame where Trump’s allies have always felt the blame belonged: on Democrats and on Obama and on everyone they already hate.