I don't need no doctor, part 2

 In August, I had a post about confidence in Anthony Fauci to provide reliable information on the coronavirus.  In March 2020, it was high among Republicans, Democrats, and Independents.  After that, it dropped among Republicans and (less strongly) independents, but stayed the same or maybe increased a little among Democrats.  This one looks at confidence in Donald Trump:  

I show two lines for each party:  one is for surveys by the Kaiser Family Foundation, and the other is surveys by other organizations.   There is a downward trend among everyone, although the difference between the KFF and other surveys makes it hard to be sure about the exact size of the trend.  But it's clear that Republican and independent loss of confidence in Fauci was not accompanied by an increase of confidence in Trump.  In the last survey (March 2022), 18% of Republicans said they trusted him a great deal, 31% said a good deal, 32% not much, and 19% none at all.

Many accounts treat Trump's support as unshakeable--that as he once said, he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and wouldn't lose any voters.  But in terms of public support, he's not that different from other politicians:   he has a core of enthusiastic supporters, but also people who support him on some things but not others, and even some who don't think much of him but regard him as better than the alternatives.  In fact, although Trump has changed the Republican party, the Republican party (specifically, the right wing of the party) has changed Trump:  on issues where he was once seen as moderate or at least flexible, he's adopted right-wing positions.  On this one, he could have pivoted to talking about the success of Operation Warp Speed, but instead tried to appeal to anti-vaccine sentiment and continued to downplay the risk of Covid.  I think this helps to explain the decline of support in his second term--when things go wrong, he doesn't think of moving towards the center, but tries to generate more enthusiasm from his base.

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]