Gallup: Trump’s approval rating is lower than Obama’s ever was
President Donald Trump’s popularity is in free fall.
A new poll released on Monday by Gallup found that Trump’s approval rating has plummeted to 36 percent — 2 points lower than President Barack Obama’s nadir of 38 percent, which he hit in both 2011 and 2014.
Trump’s popularity took a particularly sharp nose-dive last week, when the president was throwing his weight behind an unpopular House health care bill, according to Gallup. (Speaker Paul Ryan’s American Health Care Act was polling at around 17 percent before it collapsed.) Trump also faced a barrage of negative publicity over his campaign’s ties to Russia, including an announcement from the FBI that it was investigating whether his associates colluded with Russian agents to influence the election.
Here are Trump’s approval/disapproval ratings from Gallup:
The new poll suggests a steep drop for the new president. Shortly after Inauguration Day, about 44 percent of America approved of Trump’s job performance and 44 percent disapproved. His approval/disapproval rating in the Gallup poll now stands at 36 to 57.
Still, not every polling agency has Trump’s approval rating sinking that low. FiveThirtyEight’s approval ratings tracker, which weighs the findings of many different pollsters, puts him at around 42 percent approval to 53 percent disapproval.
But Trump’s been consistently unpopular for a first-year president throughout his term. Beyond Obama, Trump is now more unpopular than several other recent presidents were at any point during their presidencies, according to Gallup. Bill Clinton’s all-time low was 37 percent, as his first year in office was weighed down by the Whitewater scandal; Gerald Ford only hit a low of 37 percent; and Dwight D Eisenhower never dipped below 48 percent.
But while ugly, Trump’s unpopularity isn’t unprecedented, either. George W. Bush sank to 25 percent during the Iraq War; Jimmy Carter fell to 28 percent; and Richard Nixon hit 24 percent as impeachment hung over his head. Even Ronald Reagan hit 35 percent in 1983 while overseeing a sluggish economy — one point below Trump’s current approval rating — so there’s still time for Trump to rebound in the public imagination.