President Donald Trump passed the 100-day mark in office last week. While the West Wing staff tried furiously to spin his executive pronouncements as a demonstration that he has kept his campaign promises, he can so far boast of zero legislative accomplishments of note. Worse, no prospective legislative victories are very far along in the congressional pipeline—both health care reform and a tax overhaul remain, at best, months away from completion. Worst of all, no president since opinion polling began has been as unpopular as Trump in his first 100 days. A raft of polls suggests that voters are deeply concerned about his fitness for the job. As much as Trump needs to put some points up on the legislative scoreboard, he desperately needs to improve these impressions, if he hopes to win a second term.
The Gallup poll regularly finds Trump’s job approval in the low 40s, and occasionally in the high 30s, but so far it has not sunk below that. The president seems to have hit a floor that is built on strong support from self-identified Republicans, about 90 percent of whom approve of the president. This is reminiscent of Obama’s job approval rating for much of his presidency—though the 44th president was polarizing, he was never broadly unpopular because Democrats stuck with him, even as independent voters did not.
This should be of cold comfort to congressional Republicans. After all, Democrats suffered historic down-ballot losses during Obama’s presidency. However polarized politics has become over the last generation, there remains a small quantum of independent, unaffiliated voters who make the electoral difference—in Congress, state legislatures, and governorships. Right now, these voters are about as sour on Trump as they ever were on Obama.
What is driving this disenchantment? It is certainly not the usual big issues. Consumer confidence, as measured by the Conference Board, is the highest it has been since the 1990s. The country is not losing soldiers overseas in deadly foreign entanglements. Usually, these are the keys to understanding presidential job approval, which is informed by the state of the union generally. Though the union is relatively strong, people are not happy with the commander in chief. It is all the more unusual seeing that voters give Trump slightly positive marks on his handling of the economy (49 percent approval in the recent CNN/ORC poll) and national security (50 percent approval). Polls conducted over the last month have also found Trump in generally positive territory for his handling of Syria, China, North Korea, and ISIS.
Some of Trump’s unpopularity may be reducible to his commitment to staunch immigration policies, which tend to be unpopular outside the GOP base. Additionally, voters have disapproved of the House Republican effort to reform health care, and Trump’s numbers have suffered accordingly—polls by CNN/ORC and Fox News found his approval on this issue in the mid-30s.
But a focus on issues overlooks the elephant in the room: Voters remain very concerned about whether Trump is up to the job. This is manifest in an array of polling questions from multiple outlets. CNN/ORC found a 52 percent majority worries that Trump’s approach to governing has “unnecessarily” put the country at risk; 51 percent do not think he is trying hard enough to be a good president; and 56 percent do not believe he has put a good team together. An astonishing 63 percent of respondents in the recent Quinnipiac University poll do not think Trump is “level headed,” while 52 percent say that the November election makes them feel “less safe.” Similarly, the ABC News/Washington Post poll found 59 percent think Trump lacks the right temperament to be president.
These sorts of numbers are unprecedented in public opinion polling on new presidents. It is not uncommon for presidents who won the White House with less than half the vote to come into office with relatively weak approval numbers. According to the Gallup poll, George W. Bush entered office with 57 percent approval, and Bill Clinton entered with 58 percent. Given the particularly bitter feelings surrounding the 2016 election, it is no wonder that Trump’s starting approval was in the mid-40s. It is also not unprecedented for presidents to quickly become unpopular. Clinton’s popularity had slipped into the 30s by early June 1993, and Harry Truman’s approval rating started in the high 80s, but sank into the mid-30s over the course of 18 months. But those slides had to do with external events—Clinton was embroiled in scandals and Truman struggled to handle the transition to a postwar economy.
No other president has turned off voters so needlessly. Indeed, the most telling result from the batch of recent polling came from Quinnipiac, which asked respondents whether Trump should continue tweeting. A whopping 68 percent said that he should not. Even Republicans were split on the matter—47 percent saying he should continue and 47 percent saying he should give it up.
Put simply, Donald Trump remains his own worst enemy. He entered the White House amidst peace and prosperity, and with a stronger congressional majority than any Republican since Herbert Hoover in 1929. While liberals and Democrats are bitter about last year’s results, many Americans no doubt want to put the vitriol of 2016 behind them—but Trump’s antics have repelled them.
It seems as though the president has yet to figure out that while governing in 21st-century America requires a dash of showmanship, it is of a substantially different kind from what Trump is used to providing. Courting controversy may be good for the ratings of a successful TV show like Celebrity Apprentice, with fewer than 10 million viewers. But there are nearly 140 million American voters, and successful politicians endeavor to be broadly popular with this diverse population.
If Trump does not turn around the views that Americans have of him, two things will happen. First, he will lose his congressional majority, probably starting with the House in 2018. Second, he will lose the White House. Americans are simply not going to reelect somebody they think is not levelheaded, makes them feel less safe, and is not trying hard enough.
Jay Cost is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
