President Donald Trump’s own base is starting to recognize something critics have long warned about, according to an economic analyst.
On Friday’s episode of “Receipts Live,” The Bulwark economics editor Catherine Rampell and its editor Jonathan V. Last pointed to new AP-NORC polling showing that 55 percent of Republicans believe Trump has prioritized his own business interests since returning to office.
About three-quarters of Americans overall said the same, and a similar share of Republicans said Trump has prioritized the business interests of his friends, family and those close to him, Rampell noted.
“This is penetrating, which I think is pretty striking because again, this is a group of voters, a group of Americans who are not particularly inclined to unplug their ears and hear this inconvenient news about how Donald Trump is getting paid off,” Rampell said.
She pointed to a string of recent reports, including one that a federal regulator was told to back off a probe into suspiciously timed trades and another on the apparently overseas buyers of Trump’s memecoin.
“Even Republicans are now acknowledging, yeah, he’s in it for himself,” she said.
Last zeroed in on the intensity of those Republicans’ responses.
“Twenty-one percent of Republicans say not at all, which is insane. But that number is slightly smaller than the percentage of Republicans who say a lot, which is 23 percent,” Last said.
“You get almost a quarter of Republicans saying, yeah, sure seems like he’s using the government to enrich himself a lot,” he added. “And that’s not nothing.”
Last cautioned that the numbers don’t mean those voters will turn against Trump, noting some might still argue “everybody does it” or that it’s “no worse than what Joe Biden” did.
Rampell also flagged a caveat. Republicans in the same survey overwhelmingly said Trump was prioritizing the country at large and people like them as well.
“If you know how priorities work, you can’t prioritize everything and everyone,” she said. “But I think this is the only way to keep a handle on all of that cognitive dissonance.”
Rampell added that a recent Fox News poll found corruption in government topped voters’ list of concerns heading into the midterms, edging out inflation and gas prices.
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