Perhaps the most surprising revelation at the end of a week convulsed by scandal was a Rasmussen poll finding Donald Trump with a positive approval rating of 51 percent, the highest level since March of last year. Despite, or perhaps because of, the escalating melodrama involving his presidency, Trump’s net approval rating continues to tick higher. It’s still in negative territory, of course—Trump remains among the most disliked and divisive presidents in modern memory. But as nightly newscasts buckle under the deluge of Russia investigations, Michael Cohen, F.B.I. witch hunts, and porn-star payoffs, even wary Republicans appear to be digging in, or at least acclimating to Trumpism.

“Did any of these revelations come as a shock to anybody?” Will Chamberlain, the director of a pro-Trump meet-up group, MAGA Meetups, asked me rhetorically. “I assumed that Trump and Stormy [Daniels] had had something,” he said, referring to Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani’s recent admission that his client had, in fact, repaid his previous attorney, Cohen, for buying Stormy’s silence about an alleged affair. “To the extent that anything happened, it’s just not really news to a lot of people. Moreover, where is this stuff getting heavy coverage? Well, it’s on CNN and MSNBC. I would defy you to find a regular viewer of CNN and MSNBC that approved of Trump beforehand.”

Indeed, the basic facts of the case—that Trump had allegedly cheated on his wife, in 2006, shortly after the birth of his son; and that Cohen had funneled $130,000 through a shell company to ensure that Daniels didn’t blab about it in the days before the 2016 election—barely registered among his supporters. Even Christian conservatives, who joined Trump for a National Day of Prayer speech on Thursday in the Rose Garden, amid news of the cover up, have his back. “The evangelical community feels more under threat now than they have at any point in the past. As a result, they’ve embraced a sort of ruthless pragmatism,” explained Chamberlain. The same voters who wouldn’t have tolerated similar behavior from George W. Bush, for instance, see Trump as their last hope in an increasingly secular world. This week alone, Trump restored a Bush-era program that allowed faith-based groups—particularly the evangelical community—to get access to more federal funding.

The cringeworthy juxtaposition of evangelical leaders praying with Trump, as allegations of infidelity and hush money played out on TV, might have sunk a lesser president. But Trump, whether intentionally or not, has a unique ability to distract from one public-relations nightmare by creating another. “The Stormy Daniels news cycle cancels out the Russia news cycle and makes it seem trivial by comparison,” observed Jack Posobiec, a MAGA-world pundit. Too many scandals breed scandal fatigue—a novel political phenomenon, it seems—diminishing old transgressions as new ones are piled on top.

That may explain Trump’s peculiar untouchability, but it doesn’t provide a theory for his improving approval rating. Sources I spoke to on the right side of the Trumpian schism that’s running through American politics pointed to several key factors: an extraordinarily low unemployment rate; rising (if still anemic) wage growth; a stock market at record highs (if trading sideways, of late); the decimation of ISIS; and the promise of a resolution to the decades-long cold war between North and South Korea. Though it isn’t clear how much credit Trump can claim for any of them, “if you said to somebody, abstractly, ‘a president is going to have the lowest unemployment in a decade and solve North Korea, why is his approval high?’ That would be an incoherent question,” said Chamberlain.