Support for Donald Trump among white women is cratering. This helps explain why, after days of tacitly condoning alleged spousal abuse by Rob Porter, which Porter denies, and former White House speechwriter David Sorensen, who also denies the accusations made against him, the president finally said last week that he was “totally opposed to domestic violence”.

It’s always been unfathomable to me that Donald Trump won a majority of white female votes in 2016, but he did. This was after the notorious Access Hollywood tape, the allegations of more than a dozen women who said he sexually harassed them.

The downward numbers are most pronounced in the Rust Belt, where Trump cleaned up in November 2016 and even carried the formerly Democratic states of Michigan and Wisconsin. A state by state Gallup poll released in February showed that nationally, Trump’s national approval rating for 2017 was an anemic 38%.

But here was the real alarm bell. The poll detected what looked like the beginning of a collapse among white, non-college educated female voters, his base. In the Rust Belt states that decided 2016, Trump slipped into a precarious position with these women.



White House says it 'could have done better' over Rob Porter allegations Read more

A fine-grained analysis of the Gallup poll done by the Atlantic showed his 2017 approval with them at 45% in Pennsylvania, 42% in Michigan, and 39% or less in Minnesota, Iowa, Ohio and Wisconsin. “Compared to his 2016 vote, his 2017 approval among blue-collar white women in the Rust Belt represented some of his largest declines anywhere – 18 points in Ohio and 19 in Wisconsin and Minnesota,” the Atlantic found.

At the time the poll was released, political analysts attributed the loss, in part, to Trump’s effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Now, with the spousal abuse allegations against Rob Porter and David Sorensen, there is another compelling reason for a collapse in Trump’s support among white women: domestic abuse.

Play Video 0:56 'We wish him well': Trump defends official accused of domestic abuse – video

This is Hillbilly Elegy country, states where rates of alcoholism and domestic abuse are high. Women voters, I suspect, will relate in a visceral way to the recent disclosures from the White House.

Several Republican consultants I know are in full panic over this and tell me their 2018 Republican clients running for Congress, already facing anti-Trump headwinds, are in despair. The Republican base among non-college educated whites had been rock solid; cracks are now visible.

The putrid accusations of domestic violence that sparked the recent exits of the White House staff secretary and a speechwriter suggest this may be a deep-rooted problem in the Trump administration. Signs of the problem were evident before the election, but now it’s inescapable.

A fish rots from the head down, and so it begins with the president himself. Ivana Trump, the president’s first wife, claimed he raped her in a deposition that was quoted in a 1993 book, Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J Trump.



The book, by former Texas Monthly and Newsweek reporter Harry Hurt III, described a violent fight between the couple. After painful scalp reduction surgery to remove a bald spot, Trump, unhappy with the procedure recommended by Ivana’s surgeon, allegedly grabbed a fistful of his wife’s hair and yanked it out, crying out: “Your fucking doctor has ruined me!”



It is important to focus on details because the rot at the heart of this presidency cannot be understood without them

Then was accused of tearing off her clothes, unzipping his pants and jamming his penis inside her for the first time in more than 16 months, according to the deposition, a copy of which Hurt obtained.

At least 19 women have accused Donald Trump of sexual harassment or assault, and he was caught on the infamous Access Hollywood tape boasting that he was able to “grab [women] by the pussy” due to his celebrity. These are the only known cases of women coming forward. There are likely more.

In the cases of Porter and Sorensen, Washington moved quickly to the more familiar turf of who knew what when rather than confront the full horror of what these men are accused of doing. But it is important to focus on these details because the full rot at the heart of this presidency cannot be understood without them.

In the summer of 2005, Porter and his first wife, Colbie Holderness, were in Florence, Italy, when she said he punched her in the face, her badly bruised eye captured in a highly disturbing and widely distributed photograph. Holderness, who married Porter in 2003, told CNN that the physical abuse began almost immediately after the wedding.



When the couple went to the Canary Islands for their honeymoon, Holderness said Porter kicked her thigh during a fight. Later, he tried to choke her. The cycle of violence was repeated with his second wife, who said he forcibly pulled her out of the shower, among other violent acts.

Sorensen’s ex-wife said he ran over her foot with his car, extinguished a cigarette on her hand, threw her into a wall, and made her fear for her life while they were on a boat off the coast of Maine.

Here is pretty much all that Trump originally had to say in the face of the testimony from three credible women: the men need “due process” and that too many men have been brought down by unproven and presumably made up allegations of sexual abuse.



That week, he tweeted: “Peoples lives are being shattered and destroyed by a mere allegation. Some are true and some are false. Some are old and some are new. There is no recovery for someone falsely accused – life and career are gone. Is there no such thing any longer as Due Process?”

Play Video 1:26 'Look, he denies it. He totally denies it,' says Trump about allegations against Roy Moore – video

Of course, his response is no surprise, given his past defense of other alleged abusers like Roy Moore, Bill O’Reilly and Roger Ailes. The president defines deviancy down.

There was only one sensible reaction to warped reactions in Trumpworld and it oddly came from Steve Bannon, the president’s exiled former chief political strategist, the man who crafted his successful strategy to win over alienated white voters.



While watching the Golden Globes he told his biographer, Joshua Green, that the backlash from women voters was going to be something fierce. “You watch. The time has come. Women are gonna take charge of society,” Bannon said, according to Green’s report. “And they couldn’t juxtapose a better villain than Trump. He is the patriarch.”

After a year of Donald Trump, there is still hope amid the horror | Jill Abramson Read more

Besides observing that the women, dressed in black to protest the epidemic of sexual abuse in the entertainment industry, would have chopped off the balls of every man in the room with a guillotine, Bannon had other choice things to say. He thinks that Oprah Winfrey could threaten a Trump presidency by becoming politically active in the 2018 midterms, and help win seats for the Democrats. Those Democrats could then impeach Trump.

Maybe. First must come the wholesale abandonment of Trump by white women voters. It’s galling, of course, to see Bannon licking his chops and smartly anticipating this powerful angry wave. On New Year’s Day, 1996, the future Trump campaign chair was charged with three misdemeanor counts of domestic violence by the Santa Monica police. (The charges were eventually dropped when his then-wife did not appear at the trial).

Bannon was reacting to the angry women in Hollywood wearing black.

But Trump needs to be worrying about the less glitzy, working-class women in white.

Jill Abramson is a Guardian columnist

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