Not even a week fully in office yet, and President Trump has managed to make history again with historically “awful numbers for a newly elected President,” according to a new Public Policy Polling poll. Things are so grim for the new President that voters think he will be the worst president since Nixon.
“Voters split evenly in their appraisals of his job performance with 44% approving and 44% disapproving of him. These are historically awful numbers for a newly elected President. When it comes to Trump’s favorability rating, only 44% of voters see him positively to 50% with a negative opinion,” PPP explained about a poll fully released Thursday.
“Voters are so dim on Trump that they think, in the first week of his administration, that he will prove to be a worse President than everyone who’s held the office since Richard Nixon,” they write.
Even worse for the President and his Republican Party are the reasons he’s so low in popularity. Voters don’t like his policies and they are concerned about his transparency and conflicts of interests from his business to his ties to Russia.
What are these policies? Oh, only things he ran on and also things the Republican Party set their hat on, like repealing Obamacare. Fifty-three percent of voters are against the Mexican border wall if taxpayers have to pay for it, and only 34% want that wall. That 34-38% is the range we often see representing the diehard Republican base.
A full 61% of voters want Congress to keep Obamacare and simply tweak the parts that aren’t working. This is a huge issue for Republicans, since they’ve been running on repealing Obamacare for years.
Things are so bad that Democrats are pining for George W. Bush, with 62-14 thinking Bush will end up having been a better President than Trump.
Donald Trump has done America the favor of putting a huge personality on the face of the Republican Party’s more egregious policies. This is bad news for Congressional Republicans and the Party at large. They need to turn this around and fast, by finding a way to contain Trump’s adolescent antics.
It is, ironically, Trump’s theatricality and penchant for grabbing the spotlight that is highlighting weaknesses within the Republican Party. For years Republicans have been skating by with the same kind of rhetoric but softened by better representatives than Trump.
Now the Republican Party is having their platform laid bare before the public and voters aren’t too impressed right now. Worse President since Nixon, and it’s not even the first full week yet.
I would like to correct the voters on this, though, as I fear Trump will end up making Nixon look good comparatively. Nixon was studious and intelligent, whereas Trump doesn’t like to read. Nixon understood policy, Trump seems to be completely clueless about the complex nuance of legislation and policy.
If any one of the already brewing scandals comes to the head, Trump will be known as the corrupt conspiracy artist President – if not a traitor, who made Nixon’s corruption look tame in comparison. At least Nixon wasn’t working against his own country for a buck.
Trump’s refusal to release his tax returns, refusal to be transparent about claims he’s divested from his businesses, involvement of his children who are running his businesses in meetings with other world leaders, and ties to Russia along with benefiting from their interference in the 2016 election all scream conflict of interest.
Within days of Trump taking office, the head of Trump Hotels management team announced hopes for a huge expansion and Trump’s Mar-A-Lago club new membership fees doubled to $200,000.00. Trump’s children are allegedly running his hotel business, but there’s no denying the Trump family is seeking to use the Trump brand as President of the US to monetary advantage, which is not only unethical but a gross abuse of the idea of a competitive market- it is what Republicans accused Obama of, “picking winners and losers.”
Except this time Trump is picking the winners to benefit his own family. And that isn’t going to go over well with the voters, and probably not with Trump Hotel competition.