1. United States
2. Wash.
3. Letter

As of today, Donald Trump’s supposedly “tanking” approval rating stands at 47%. Which is pretty much where it’s been for the past eleven years. Yes, a majority of Americans dissaprove of the tarriffs. Yes, a majority think the economy is heading in the wrong direction. And yes, a majority dissaprove of the job Trump is doing. His power derives not from the size but the durability of his popular support, and there’s rarely been an approval rating as stubbornly durable as his. I am uninterested in whatever minor fluctuation will follow yesterday’s vile display in the Oval Office, or tomorrow’s outrage, or next week’s. They will mean nothing. What will it take for his opponents to realize his supporters won’t turn away from him? Because the answer to that question is crucial. The story of the Trump era isn’t “A bad man came along and duped a bunch of well-meaning, gullible people.” Trump didn’t conjure his supporters from the ether with his magic MAGA wand. His supporters conjured him. They wanted him. Badly. They’d been looking, searching, begging, screaming for someone like him, pushing every Republican candidate further and further to the right with every election cycle, demanding loudly that they “take a tougher” line on this, and “not give an inch” on that, that they “tell it like it is,” for decades. Trumps supporters are never going to see the light. Trump supporters will remain Trump supporters NO MATTER WHAT. Did you ever think we’d see Republican voters support a candidate who was openly subservient to Russia? A flagrant, serial adulterer and drug user? A denigrator of the military? A draft dodger? A New Yorker?! No, the only thing Donald Trump could do to tank his approval rating would be to stand in front of a camera and say, “Black and Latino people are as fully human as any white man or woman. They are posessed of the same inalienable rights, and deserving of the full enjoyment of those rights and the opportunities they promise, opportunities they have for too long been denied.” Now THAT would be a deal breaker, and it ain’t gonna happen. Progress is going to come when we, not they, see the light. Before we can meanigfully slow the MAGA rampage it needs to come to terms with the fact that the enemy isn’t merely Trump, but the people who put him in the White House. That is a very hard thing for a lot of us to accept about our countrymen and fellow republican voters. Our energies should be channeled towards each other, the rational ppl. Galvanizing, motivating, and enabling each other. Creating and sustaining solidarity in this fight against these ideals and to create a new base of support. Our only hope lies in our commitment to keeping students from being disappeared, government workers from being fired, cancer research labs from being defunded, EVERYONE having the right to a fair trial, the elderly to having a working social security system, and democracy from being destroyed.