By Sabrina Tavernise @ nytimes.com, Aug. 19

[.....] “Let’s be honest, the people who are currently outraged are the same people who have always been outraged,” said Ms. Hicks, 35, a lifelong Republican who lives in Boston. “The media makes it seem like something has changed, when in reality nothing has.” [....]

From Ms. Hicks’s perspective, the president simply pointed out a fact: Leftists bore some responsibility for the violence, too. Of course, Nazis and white supremacists are bad, she said. But she does not believe Mr. Trump has any affinity for them. He said so himself. But she is exasperated that a significant part of the country seems to think otherwise. The week’s frenzied headlines read to her like bulletins from another planet. “I feel like I am in a bizarro universe where no one but me is thinking logically,” she said. “We have gone so off the rails of what this conversation is about.”

Ms. Hicks, who is black and grew up in Charlotte, N.C., welcomes the public soul-searching on the meaning of Confederate monuments. She believes that the statues were erected to intimidate black people and that they should be taken down. But instead of focusing on that, she sees opponents of Mr. Trump focusing on Mr. Trump.“This is not about me as a black person, and my history,” she said. “This is about this president and wanting to take him down because you don’t like him.”

Mr. Bannon’s departure was more noise that didn’t mean much, she said. “The show is going to go on.”

Much of what powers the love for Mr. Trump among his core supporters is his boxer’s approach to the political class in Washington and to the news media, a group that in their eyes has approached them with a double standard and a sneering sense of superiority for years.

Larry Laughlin, a retired businessman from a Minneapolis suburb, compares Mr. Trump to [....]