Jason Johnson, a self-described “high-stress person,” tries to avoid the daily news out of Washington.

He has no Twitter account, no news apps on his phone and doesn’t watch cable news. He even avoids talking politics with friends to try to keep his blood pressure down.

But when he checked his email on Thursday, a headline flashed across his screen about an anonymous opinion piece in The New York Times that described President Donald Trump as reckless and amoral. Written by an unnamed senior administration official, it said aides worked secretly to thwart parts of Trump’s agenda and his worst inclinations.

“I saw the headline and thought, ‘Ugh,’” said Johnson, 41, a construction project manager in Miami Beach, Fla.

The chaos and rancor depicted inside the White House in the op-ed piece and a new book by veteran journalist Bob Woodward is reverberating not only in Washington but all across the country – in places like Miami Beach; Denver; Freemont, Ohio; and Murfreesboro, Tenn.

Though Johnson is a Democrat and didn’t vote for Trump, he and other Americans interviewed by the USA TODAY NETWORK said they are finding it hard to escape the daily drama coming out of the White House.

And though it’s too early to gauge the toll from the latest stream of bad news, the stakes for Trump are huge. Confirmation hearings are under way in the Senate for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The midterm congressional elections on Nov. 6 will determine if Republicans lose control of the House and the Senate.

All of this comes at a time when Trump appears to be losing ground with voters.

Three polls released in the past couple of weeks have put his approval rating at 36 to 38 percent, and others have shown it hovering around 40 to 42 percent. Those numbers represent a slight drop from last month, when most polls put Trump’s popularity in the mid-40 percent range. Among his core supporters, however, Trump's popularity remains high.

'Where is the middle ground?'

Carol Bettam, a nurse in Orlando, Fla., said the chaos in Washington doesn’t affect her day-to-day life, but she said she is terrified of the long-term implications of the increasingly divisive political tone and what she sees as dangerous precedents.

“The problem with the debate right nowadays is that it’s ‘You’re on this side or that side,’” she said. “There are two corners, and you have to go to one or the other. Where is the middle ground?”

Bettam, 58, was on a cruise with her family this week and didn’t catch up on the news until their ship docked in Miami on Thursday morning, hours after the anonymous article caused a sensation in Washington. She felt as if she should have been surprised by the torrent awaiting them. But she wasn’t.

“Just another day in the neighborhood,” said Bettam, who like other members of her family, is an independent and did not support Trump in 2016.

Her son, Alex Bettam, 31, a construction manager in Denver, signed up for Twitter after the 2016 election just to keep up with Trump’s missives. Now, he’s ready to quit the social media platform.

“I start off every day in a bad mood,” he said. “I joined just to pay attention. Now I’m sick of paying attention.”

His wife, Rosalie, said talk of Trump has even invaded the marijuana dispensary where she works in Denver.

“People just start talking politics now,” she said. “Random Trump supporters who just start talking about him.”

Lesson for the day

Kent Syler, a political scientist at Middle Tennessee State University, was prepping for his politics class when the headlines started popping up about the anti-Trump editorial in The New York Times. Syler knew he’d found the day’s lesson.

Syler dissected the article, studied how it was being portrayed on conservative and liberal media sites, and analyzed its potential influence on Trump’s popularity and the midterm elections.

“The collective thoughts of the class were that we’ve been through so many things, so many huge news stories about Donald Trump that would have derailed most other politicians, that really all we could do was sit and wait to see if this was any different,” Syler said.

Syler said he has talked to a lot of people – Republicans, Democrats and independents – about the article to gauge how it’s playing. Not surprisingly, how they view it depends largely on what they think of Trump.

Trump’s base voters see it as another attempt by the media to topple the president, Syler said, while middle-of-the-road Republicans who back Trump think that he brings a lot of the criticism on himself but that the media is biased against him. Democrats view the editorial as “one more reason to be afraid of Donald Trump,” Syler said.

“It is so tribal,” he said. “People are just dug in.”

'This too will pass'

In Howard, Wis., Steve Lasee, 60, said he hasn’t read the op-ed but has heard from others that “it’s pretty atrocious.” Lasee, a longtime Trump supporter, believes the criticisms are part of a broader conspiracy by liberals, Democrats and Republicans to remove Trump from office.

“This too will pass,” he said. “It’s just one more attempt to impeach a duly elected president. This will have no effect on my life or anyone else’s. It’s just the show of the day.”

Trump himself has blasted the opinion piece writer as “gutless” for offering the criticisms anonymously. Other Republicans have insisted the writer step forward and resign from the administration.

But Geron Tate, president of the NAACP in Mansfield, Ohio, said the author should not reveal his or her identity.

“That person would be fired immediately,” said Tate, who did not vote for Trump in 2016 but doesn't identify with one particular political party. “That would take away a source of real-time information that is coming out through the different media circuits, cycles."

In Indianapolis, Danielle Diedrich, 19, wasn’t all that shocked by the editorial.

“I just feel like (Trump’s) whole (approach) from the beginning has been sleazy and just not really playing the game fair,” said Diedrich, who generally considers herself a Democrat and voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

“I don’t think it’s crazy surprising that that would happen,” she said.

Biased in both directions

Patti Klingel of Marion, Ohio, doesn’t follow the news anymore because she says it’s too biased in both directions.

“One says this while the other says something else,” said Klingel, who voted for Trump in 2016.

She doesn’t like everything Trump says – “I voted for him at the time because I thought I was picking the lesser of two evils” – but believes there are signs he is doing a good job.

“The economy is an indicator that he’s doing his job, or at least someone in his office is doing a good job,” she said. “The president doesn’t do it alone.”

In Chillicothe, Ohio, Chasity Betts-Archer, 47, said she found the op-ed "shocking and scary" in its depiction of the Trump White House.

"Things have to be bad if the people that he actually does trust are doing what they’re doing," she said.

But Betts-Archer, who said she doesn't vote party lines but voted for Clinton in 2016, said it was important that Americans pay attention to what's going on in Washington, even if they don't like what they see.

“If you choose to ignore it, you’re just as much of the problem,” she said.

But John Stull, 67, a Trump supporter from Freemont, Ohio, said nothing that has been written about the president has changed his own opinion.

“He’s going to go down as one of the best presidents we’ve ever had,” he said.

Stull said that if the op-ed was truly written by an administration official, Trump should fire that person. But he said he was not convinced that was the case, adding “It was probably written by The Times."

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Contributing: Jeff Bollier, Green Bay (Wisconsin) Press-Gazette; Craig Shoup, reporter, The Fremont (Ohio) News-Messenger; Emily Mills, Mansfield (Ohio) News Journal; Kaitlin Lange, IndyStar; Michaela Sumner, Chillicothe (Ohio) Gazette