Newsweek Politics
Trump Complains About Polls Showing He’s Least Popular President Ever
T. Marcin, Newsweek August 7, 2017
Hold on to your hats, folks, because this might shock you: President Donald Trump vented his anger online Monday morning. The leader of the free world took to Twitter to share some of the things grinding his gears, as he is wont to do.
Trump posted some of his usual gripes, fake news (otherwise known as news that paints him in a bad light) chief among them. Despite being in the midst of a more than two-week vacation at his Bedminster golf course, Trump also made sure to post that he was “working hard from New Jersey while White House goes through long planned renovation,” which didn’t directly mention Newsweek’s recent viral cover depicting him as a lazy boy-king but could be seen as a response of sorts.
Other tweets from Trump Monday morning were far angrier than the post claiming he was working in New Jersey.
After a standalone tweet railing against The New York Times, Trump posted a series of tweets stating: “The Trump base is far bigger & stronger than ever before (despite some phony Fake News polling). Look at rallies in Penn, Iowa, Ohio and West Virginia. The fact is the Fake News Russian collusion story, record Stock Market, border security, military strength, jobs…..Supreme Court pick, economic enthusiasm, deregulation & so much more have driven the Trump base even closer together. Will never change! Hard to believe that with 24/7 #Fake News on CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, NYTIMES & WAPO, the Trump base is getting stronger!”
The president has good reason to be upset at polling firms: They’re nearly unanimous in assessing that Americans, by and large, think Trump is doing a bad job in the White House. The weighted average from data-centric website FiveThirtyEight pegged Trump’s approval rating at just 37 percent Monday, while it had his disapproval rating at 57.3 percent. No other president in the history of modern polling has had an approval rating so low on day 199 of their presidency, where Trump is now, and only former President Gerald Ford was close, at 39.4 percent approval—and that was in the wake of pardoning his predecessor, Richard Nixon, who resigned in disgrace amid the Watergate scandal.
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To be clear, other presidents have had lower approval ratings, but none so early in their tenure, when leaders are typically gifted a grace period of sorts. Former President George W. Bush sunk to the mid-20s, for instance, but it took eight years, two unpopular wars and a struggling economy to get there.
Trump does appear to still have a base—and perhaps some of those voters are digging in and supporting him even more—but he is wrong to claim his base is growing. A Quinnipiac University poll last week, for instance, found just 43 percent of non-college-educated, white voters approved of the job Trump was doing, while 50 percent disapproved. It’s a remarkable turn of events, considering that is the demographic who voted for the president in droves in November. CNN’s exits polls, for instance, found 66 percent of non-college-educated whites voted for Trump.
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