Trump's briefings now providing diminishing--even negative--returns
Until this week, if you were shown a graph of President Trump’s Gallup Poll job-approval ratings since taking office, and told that at some point along that graph, the U.S. dipped into a recession that some feared could even turn into a depression, you would be hard pressed to pinpoint at what point along his 1,183 days in office the recession began.
Maybe we still don't but the Gallup Poll released Thursday afternoon caught a lot of people's eye. Gallup’s latest, covering April 1-14, shows 43 percent approving of Trump, with 54 percent disapproving. That’s 6 points below his 49 percent approval (45 percent disapproval) rating for the period of March 13-22.
While it’s true that this is the biggest drop in Trump’s approval rating from one Gallup Poll to the next, prudence (and experience) tells us not make a big deal out of this until it’s corroborated elsewhere, both in subsequent Gallup polling and surveys from other respected research organizations. One poll does not a trend make.
Moreover, Trump’s numbers have been remarkably static throughout his presidency. Despite events that are about as good as White House occupants can possibly expect—six consecutive months of 50-year-low unemployment rates, for instance—he rarely even approached 50 percent approval. Conversely, stories and behaviors that would be career-killers for anyone else—like hush money paid to nude models, foul language in televised speeches, and some pretty shady meetings—barely dented his approvals.
The truth is that most Americans have fixed views of Trump, with new facts or circumstances mattering very little. As many as three-quarters of voters either strongly approve or strongly disapprove of his performance. For one substantial group of Americans, there is little if anything that he can do right; with another group, there is nothing that he could do wrong. That’s it. Not everyone fits into those groups, but a whole lot do, diminishing the impact of events that in other times would have moved a lot of numbers.
https://cookpolitical.com/analysis/national/national-politics/trumps-briefings-now-providing-diminishing-even-negative
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