NBC News: How can people who don't think Trump is truthful still support him?

Er … maybe they’re getting used to lies from politicians? A new poll from NBC News and Survey Monkey give Donald Trump his highest approval ratings so far in his presidency, which isn’t surprising given the economic growth and successes he’s had in foreign policy. What does surprise NBC is that Trump achieves a 45% approval rating, tying his best for 2018, despite 61% of respondents believing that the president has trouble telling the truth:

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Most Republicans who think President Donald Trump is loose with the truth still approve of the job he’s doing as president, a new NBC News|SurveyMonkey online poll shows.

While 76 percent of Republicans believe Trump tells the truth all or most of the time, 22 percent say he tells the truth only some of the time or less. Among such Republicans, over half of them (56 percent) still approve of his work as president.

Meanwhile, an overwhelming majority of Democrats and Democratic-leaners (94 percent) and three-quarters of independents (76 percent) believe the president tells the truth only some of the time or even less frequently. A majority of Americans overall — 61 percent — think Trump regularly has trouble telling the truth.

Still, Trump’s current job approval is 45 percent, according to the survey — which is tied with the highest rate of approval recorded by the NBC News|SurveyMonkey poll since he began his presidency.

NBC zeroes in on the 56% of the 22% of GOP respondents in a section called ‘WHO ARE THESE REPUBLICANS’, which doesn’t look at all accusatory, of course. They’re mainly younger and tend to be from urban areas, so perhaps cynicism isn’t the driving factor. If it is, then perhaps we should look at that environment to see what creates it. Interestingly, the poll internals (which do not appear to be available for review) show that they’re not red-meat Trump voters; they don’t tend to put immigration as high up on their priority list, focusing more on jobs and the economy.

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That suggests that the approval rating is driven more by pragmatic reaction to Trump’s agenda rather than a personal evaluation of the man himself. After all, we’re talking about job approval, not favorability. It’s entirely possibly to hold in parallel, without contradiction, the thoughts that I like Trump’s policy and appointment decisions and I don’t think he’s a nice person. The latter will matter more in an election year, but not as much as we might think, given the 2016 election results. If you’re a Republican or even an independent, there’s much to like about Trump’s policies and appointments — and for those who don’t like those, his relative honesty won’t be the driving factor for job disapproval anyway.

Shouldn’t we want our politicians to be honest, though? Of course! But what was our choice in 2016 again? It was between a candidate who has lied and prevaricated for years …  and also Donald Trump. The other candidate not only lied, but corrupted government in hiding her official communications as Secretary of State from Congress and the courts, and then lied about that for the next several years. She’s still lying about it to this day. And what happened when she got caught? Nothing. No one held her accountable at all, except finally American voters.

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If Donald Trump commits corruption, it seems doubtful he’ll get off as easy, but voters can still send him packing in a couple of years. Perhaps the answer to the conundrum posed in this poll is even more pragmatic. Would it have been any different had the election turned out differently? We’d still have a liar in the White House and policies and appointments we’d detest. In that light, it’s pretty easy to separate Trump’s job approval from his character.

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