This piece by David Lauter makes a point I hadn’t heard before. Trump’s been famous for a very long time and his “approval” rating has been pretty much the same. Since the 80s. There’s a fact about Donald Trump that both devotees and detractors often ignore, and it’s key to understanding what likely will happen politically — and what won’t — if any of the several criminal investigations of him lead to an indictment: Few people have ever been known so widely for so long. How widely? In 1999, 16 years before he launched his campaign for president, almost 9 in 10 Americans already knew enough about Trump to have an opinion of him, Gallup found. That year, Trump was as widely known as Al Gore, the sitting vice president, who was about to launch his fourth national campaign. Slightly more people had an opinion about Trump than about George W. Bush —the governor of Texas and son of a former president — who would defeat Gore in 2000. By contrast, only about a third of Americans that year had an opinion of John McCain, who was already in his third term as a U.S. senator from Arizona and would be the GOP nominee in 2008. As for the president at the time, almost all Americans had an opinion of Bill Clinton in 1999, the seventh year of his presidency. But as late as January of 1992, when he was already running for the job, a majority of Americans said they had never heard of him. Trump’s celebrity dates back…