Trump faces challenging path one year out from election

NEWTON, Iowa — A year before voters head to the polls to pick America’s next president, the country stands bitterly divided over its own future, the leaders who will guide us there and even their fellow citizens.

The America that both President Trump and his Democratic rivals seek to lead is backed more strongly into its partisan corners than at any point in recent memory, less likely to give the benefit of the doubt to those on the other side of the aisle, less interested in compromise and even more suspicious of the other side’s motives.

There are two things Americans do agree on: The first is the extent of the division within the country. Three-quarters of voters recently told Pew Research Center pollsters that most Republicans and most Democrats do not even agree on the same set of basic facts from which to begin a debate.