Last week was the worst seven-day stretch of the Trump presidency, as many journalists have put it. And yet even if they seemed to have good reasons to say it, his approval ratings don’t seem to have budged.
Two NBC News-Wall Street Journal polls taken in the aftermath of Paul Manafort’s convictions and Michael Cohen’s guilty pleas found their troubles have had no major impact on Trump’s job approval rating.
“Between Aug. 18 and Aug. 22 — the day after the news involving former Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort and former Trump attorney Michael Cohen — the president’s approval rating stood at 46 percent approve, 51 percent disapprove,” NBC News reports. “In a separate NBC/WSJ survey, conducted Aug. 22 through Aug. 25, Trump’s approval rating was 44 percent approve and 52 percent disapprove. That’s within the poll’s margin of error.”
Obviously people outside the media have different priorities than the press. They might not factor Manafort and Cohen’s problems into their assessments of Trump’s job performance — especially in a strong economy. But the contrast between the stability in these two polls and the firestorm in the media last week should give us pause.
There’s no way around the fact that the Manafort and Cohen news of last week was high drama, and of consequence for Trump. But when asked specifically about “the job Donald Trump is doing as president,” 44-46 percent of the country gave him their stamp of approval anyway. Many in the media may disagree with that judgment, but the industry has to reckon with the reality that nearly half of the country has discarded their conventional wisdom.
