Donald Trump is still historically unpopular compared with other new US presidents, a new poll showed.
“At 47%, President Donald Trump’s initial job approval rating for his second term is similar to the inaugural 45% reading during his first term, again placing him below all other elected presidents dating back to 1953,” wrote Megan Brenan, a senior editor for Gallup, which carried out the poll.
“Trump remains the only elected president with sub-50% initial approval ratings, and his latest disapproval rating (48%) is three percentage points higher than in 2017.”
John F Kennedy remains the most popular modern president at the start of his term, according to Gallup polling. In the first month of his presidency, in 1961, the Democrat enjoyed 72% approval and just 6% disapproval.
Dwight Eisenhower (1953) and Barack Obama (2009) enjoyed the next-highest approval ratings, at 68%. Jimmy Carter, who died last month aged 100, scored 66% approval in February 1977, at the start of his single term in office.
“Most presidents have experienced a ‘honeymoon period’, with strong job approval ratings in the initial months of their presidencies that then fade as time passes,” Brenan wrote.
Not Trump, though other polling has shown him with slightly higher approval ratings.
In 2017, Trump arrived in office having beaten Hillary Clinton in the electoral college but having lost the popular vote. This year, Trump is back in power despite having been impeached twice and being the only convicted felon ever elected president; still, he beat Kamala Harris by a convincing margin in the electoral college and by more than 2m ballots in the popular vote.
Claiming a strong mandate for radical policies including mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and sweeping attacks on federal government agencies and employees, Trump has begun his second term with a blizzard of executive orders.
Democrats accuse Trump of breaking the law with such moves as firing government inspectors general and ordering a federal funding freeze, from which he was forced to retreat.
Trump has also made a string of controversial picks for cabinet positions. Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host with far-right views facing accusations of serious personal misconduct, which he denied, was confirmed as secretary of defense.
Nominees now in the confirmation process include Robert F Kennedy Jr, a vaccine conspiracy theorist named for health secretary; Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman picked for director of national intelligence; and Kash Patel, a hardline Trump ally and election denier nominated to lead the FBI.
Gallup reported that Americans were “divided in their views of Trump’s pace in addressing the major problems facing the country today, with 40% saying it is ‘about right,’ 37% saying it is ‘too fast’ and 14% saying it is ‘not fast enough’”.
Approval and disapproval for Trump was sharply split on partisan lines. Other polling has shown negative results for many of Trump’s policies and orders, though policies including reducing the size of the federal government enjoy majority support.
For Gallup, Brenan noted that Trump’s approval rating was not much lower than those for Ronald Reagan, a modern Republican saint, and his successor, George HW Bush, at the starts of their stints in office, in 1981 and 1989. But, Brenan wrote, “initial evaluations of Trump differ in that Americans are much more likely to disapprove of his performance rather than have no opinion, as was the case for the elder Bush and Reagan”.
Four years ago, Joe Biden had a 57% approval rating and 37% disapproval rating, nine and 11 points better than Trump now.
Trump still repeats the lie that his loss to Biden in 2020 was the result of electoral fraud – the lie that fueled the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Last week, on his first day back in office, Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of more than 1,500 people convicted in relation to a riot linked to nine deaths, law enforcement suicides among them. The most serious crimes committed by those pardoned ranged from violence against police to seditious conspiracy.
According to Gallup, Trump is the only modern president never to have received an approval rating of 50% or higher.
