What's Behind Trump's Rising Popularity?

It would be easy to read the headlines this week and conclude that the Trump administration is in even more trouble than normal. The White House still can’t get its story straight on Staff Secretary Rob Porter’s departure amid domestic-violence accusations. Chief of Staff John Kelly seems to be losing support from his subordinates and his boss. And the boss himself is stubbornly refusing to offer even a wisp of sympathy to victims of abuse.

This interpretation wouldn’t be wrong—these scandals are real and they are disturbing on a number of fronts—but it threatens to eclipse the ways in which the political picture has improved in recent weeks for both President Trump and his sometimes uneasy Republican allies.

First, the president’s unpopular for a first-term president, but against that low baseline, he’s seen improvement.