It’s been nearly a year since President Trump took office and the stock market is at a record-breaking high, wages are increasing, the Islamic State has nearly been defeated, a government shutdown has been diverted because of a bipartisan compromise, NAFTA is being renegotiated, and illegal immigration is at its lowest in decades.
So why is Trump still the most unpopular first-term president?
First, clarification needs to be made about polling. To the average American who reads the news but is not a seasoned politico, here are the details about polls.
Not all polls are the same and not all are fake, plus the sample size is important. Polls from groups such as Pew Research, Gallup, CBS News, and Lucid ask all Americans how they feel about Trump regardless of whether they’re registered to vote, likely to vote, or even care about politics. These polls are useful but don’t tell you much about how an election will go. The same people who would cite Taylor Swift or Beyonce as the greatest living American are more likely to vote in these polls than on election day.
Polling companies such as Quinnipiac, Survey Monkey, Ipsos, Rasmussen, Morning Consult, CNN, Fox News, Marist, and Public Policy Polling are more accurate because they narrow the field to just likely or registered voters.
So when you see new stories that say “Trump hits all-time low” or “Trump has come back,” look at who is doing the reporting.
That being said, Trump’s numbers are pretty bad. Among registered and likely voters, he’s about at 40 percent favorable against 56 percent unfavorable.
There are three key reasons why.
Trump’s addiction to Twitter is toxic. Polls have consistently shown that the one big area of bipartisanship in America is that everyone hates Trump’s tweets. A Quinnipiac poll released back in October showed that 70 percent of registered voters, including 53 percent of Republicans and 68 percent of Independents, wanted Trump to stop tweeting.
Trump has said that Twitter is his way of sending out his message and bypassing the liberal media’s “fake news.” That’s completely understandable and sometimes very effective, as was the case when he tweeted that he was the first president to keep his promise on moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem.
However, those tweets are the exception, not the rule to his constant fights with media personalities, failing newspapers, or morning TV show hosts.
Tweeting or retweeting instant reactions to the press feeds the narrative that the president is petty, media figures are more important than they actually are, and that he cares more about personality quarrels than governing the country.
Yes, Twitter and Trump’s personality shouldn’t matter as much as the fact that the economy is doing great, but it does. People want to like their leaders, have a beer with them, and feel like they’re looking out for their best interests. The way Trump is currently using social media is divisive, distracting, and hurting his favorability by driving stories that make him look bad.
Trump’s second problem is the Republican Congress and the legislation that they’re pushing. Back in January, the president made a possible fatal flaw in letting House Speaker Paul Ryan drive the legislative agenda, which has been a total and complete disaster.
Ryan is one of the most out-of-touch and ideological members of the House of Representatives. His dream of creating Kemp Republicanism is a total fantasy that the public fully rejects.
Being driven purely by ideology mixed with the fact that he’s a poor communicator and has bad leadership skills has created a situation where the president betrays his base by supporting the establishment Republican agenda that betrays both his populist base and motivates Democrats. Examples of this include the two terrible versions of the Obamacare repeal, the recent tax reform bill, expanding H2B visas for more low-skilled workers, and repealing the FCC rule that bars internet providers from sharing data on customers’ activities.
Ryan is only outdone in his level of incompetence by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose failure to bring Trump’s nominees up for Senate votes and keep together his coalition has made him one of the most unpopular people in the country.
Republicans have a small window in 2018 to change this by bringing forward legislation Trump ran on: bills that fix student debt, fund state’s efforts to fight the opioid crisis, build the border wall, end chain migration and the Visa Lottery System in exchange for Green Cards for DACA recipients, audit the Federal Reserve, and pass an infrastructure bill, as well as “Right-To-Try” legislation.
Judging on the base of Ryan’s comments, though, almost none of this will be tackled in the upcoming year. Ryan plans on wasting any political capital he and President Trump have left by trying to tackle Medicaid and Medicare reform. It’s an absolutely idiotic suicide mission that could land the GOP in the minority in 2018.
Lastly, Trump has a media problem. Yes, they hate him and slander him just to feed their viewers and readers their daily supply of bad Trump news. Their stories, both the baseless ones and the true ones, are setting a narrative in people’s minds about how the president is either corrupt, incompetent, or both.
While there’s no stopping some of them from lying about everything from Russia to the size of his crowds, Trump can stop feeding them the attention they crave. Just on Monday morning alone, while a terrorist was attempting to kill Americans in New York, Trump was angrily tweeting about a New York Times story from over the weekend. He can stop giving exclusives to Maggie Haberman. Reject media credentials to news outlets who try to make their journalists the story rather than asking questions and reporting.
Trump’s first year in office has been far more successful than the prophets of doom predicted throughout 2016. Yet and still, the president’s unpopularity is almost entirely driven by himself. The good news is he has the power to change that, the bad news is it’s up to him and him alone.
Ryan Girdusky (@RyanGirdusky) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a writer based in New York.
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