How to Lose a Country in 100 Days: Trump's Weak Poll Numbers
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What are the key polling numbers for Trump in his first 100 days?
Okay, this week we will hit the 100-day mark of Donald Trump's presidency. If you can't believe how quickly time has flown by, that's not at all how I feel. But if that's how you feel, don't worry, everyone. There are only 1,361 days to go of this journey. Now, the first hundred days, though, is often the high watermark of a presidency. You're fresh off a political win. You have momentum. You can finally try to implement the plans you talked about on the campaign trail. You're still in a sort of honeymoon phase of your presidency for most presidents. It's a time when the American people are most willing to extend some benefit of the doubt of what you're going to do. But as we approach the end of Trump's first hundred days, it seems he was pretty quick to squander whatever goodwill he came in with. And that's not just me saying, I mean, poll after poll after poll. And I literally mean there's so many of them is making that all perfectly clear. There was a new NBC News poll out just this morning that shows Trump's favorability is at just 45 percent.
Now, Fox News poll put his approval a point lower at 44 percent, which, by the way, is the lowest rating that Fox has ever measured for any president at this point in their term. And those weren't even the worst numbers Trump saw this week. A Washington Post, ABC News poll showed his approval rating at just 39 percent. And then there are the numbers on the specific issues. And this is where I think it gets very interesting. Like these from The New York Times. Trump's underwater by four points on immigration, an issue that typically had been his strength. He's underwater by eight points on managing the federal government, underwater by 11 points on trade, by 12 points on the economy, by 14 points on foreign conflicts, underwater by 21 points on his handling of the war between Russia and Ukraine. And he's underwater by 21 points on his handling of the case involving Kilmar Obrega-Garcia.
And I think what we're seeing here very clearly is just how badly Donald Trump overplayed his hand. Part of the reason he overplayed his hand is because of his completely warped view of what the outcome in November meant. I mean, you might remember in the weeks and months following the election, Donald Trump and his allies claimed he had a historic mandate to basically do whatever he wanted. America has given us an unprecedented opportunity. and powerful mandate. They're just upset. They're desperate. They're humiliated. They're embarrassed. But Donald Trump has a mandate. The president-elect clearly buoyed by his victory telling me in our conversation today that he believes he has a, quote, mandate.
Donald Trump has a mandate. He has the greatest presidential mandate probably since Reagan in 1984. The presidential election of November 5th was a mandate like has not been seen in many decades. Now, no matter how many times he or people around him say it, he didn't even win a majority of the vote. And that is just a fact. And yet Donald Trump thought he had a mandate to start a trade war. Thought he had a mandate to pick people like Pete Hegseth for his cabinet to oversee the Defense Department. He thought he had a mandate to effectively kidnap legal residents and ship them off to foreign prisons. But he never did. And now in poll after poll after poll, the American people are basically telling the president that they are not OK with any of this. I mean, in that New York Times poll that I mentioned, by a wide margin, voters think Trump has simply gone too far.
Sixty six percent of voters across the country, two thirds of the electorate, describe Trump's first term in office for this first this hundred days as chaotic. And fifty nine percent described it as scary. So too far, chaotic, scary. Not the words you want your first hundred days, by the way, but it all sounds kind of right. It's not hard to see why the public feels that way either, especially since the country is now facing so many crises of Trump's own making. I mean, just consider his delusional trade policy. Trump promised that punishing tariffs would force countries like China to negotiate better deals. And yet China's basically called his bluff.
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2 chaptersSpeakers
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