{"id":19582,"date":"2017-01-18T06:39:36","date_gmt":"2017-01-18T06:39:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/?p=19582"},"modified":"2017-01-18T06:39:36","modified_gmt":"2017-01-18T06:39:36","slug":"trump-entering-white-house-unbent-and-unpopular","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.biphoo.com\/bipnews\/news\/trump-entering-white-house-unbent-and-unpopular.html","title":{"rendered":"Trump Entering White House Unbent and Unpopular"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Trump Entering White House Unbent and Unpopular<\/span><\/strong><\/span><\/h2>\n

Trump Entering White House Unbent and Unpopular:-<\/strong> In one way at least, President-elect Donald J. Trump has already surpassed all of his recent predecessors. It took Barack Obama 18 months in the White House for his approval rating to slip to 44 percent in Gallup polling, and it took George W. Bush 4\u00bd years to fall that far. Mr. Trump got there before even being sworn in.<\/span><\/p>\n

Indeed, Mr. Trump will take office on Friday with less popular support than any new president in modern times, according to an array of surveys, a sign that he has failed to rally Americans behind him, beyond the base that helped him win in November. Rather than a unifying moment, his transition to power has seen a continuation of the polarization of the election last year.<\/span><\/p>\n

Where other presidents used the weeks before their inauguration to put the animosities of the campaign behind them and to try to knit the country together again, Mr. Trump has approached the interregnum as if he were a television wrestling star. He has taken on a civil rights icon, a Hollywood actress, intelligence agencies, defense contractors, European leaders and President Obama. The healing theme common at this stage in the four-year presidential cycle is absent.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cHe seems to want to engage with every windmill that he can find, rather than focus on the large aspect of assuming the most important position on earth,\u201d Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said on CNN on Tuesday. \u201cAnd obviously, apparently, according to the polls, many Americans are not happy with that approach when he has not even assumed the presidency.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Two polls out on Tuesday \u2014 one by CNN and ORC and another by The Washington Post and ABC News \u2014 found that just 40 percent of Americans approved of Mr. Trump\u2019s performance heading into the inauguration on Friday. NBC News and The Wall Street Journal put his approval rating at 44 percent, calling it the lowest rating ever for an incoming president.<\/span><\/p>\n

By comparison, shortly after their inaugurations, Mr. Obama was at 68 percent and Mr. Bush was at 57 percent in Gallup surveys. Both used the time after their initial victories to preach a message of inclusion and to extend a hand to their opposition, even if it did not ultimately last.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mr. Trump\u2019s advisers said privately that his unexpected rise to power showed that such traditional barometers did not matter as much anymore. If polls were to be believed, he would not have been president, they said.<\/span><\/p>\n

Still, the anemic numbers clearly irritated Mr. Trump, who lashed out on Tuesday. \u201cThe same people who did the phony election polls, and were so wrong, are now doing approval rating polls,\u201d he wrote on Twitter. \u201cThey are rigged just like before.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Although polling in several Midwest battleground states failed to accurately reflect the actual results on Election Day, national polls generally came within a percentage point of the actual popular vote, which Hillary Clinton won with 48 percent to Mr. Trump\u2019s 46 percent.<\/span><\/p>\n

For Mr. Trump, the worry about approval ratings would be less about what it might mean for the next election, still years away, but about how such numbers are interpreted by members of Congress, who historically have been more deferential to popular presidents than unpopular ones.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cEvery president starts off with a good-will account with Congress that eventually draws down,\u201d said Phil Schiliro, who was Mr. Obama\u2019s White House legislative director in his first term. \u201cAs approval ratings drop, the account sinks very quickly. And that makes it much harder to bring Congress along on the president\u2019s priorities.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Steve Israel, a Democrat who represented New York in the House, said the biggest challenge for Mr. Trump might be with nervous members of his own party. \u201cRight now, Trump\u2019s numbers are kryptonite for 21 House Republicans in districts that he lost,\u201d he said. \u201cSo not only does he begin with low poll numbers, he begins with a significant potential bloc of resistance in his own caucus.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

But Mr. Trump has shown that he intends to lead more through force of personality than through the breadth of his coalition. Brash and uninhibited, he seeks out enemies and allows few slights to go unanswered. He has repaired bridges with some critics, like Mitt Romney, but has made only sporadic efforts to reach out to parts of the public that have not supported him.<\/span><\/p>\n

His strongest supporters cheer his pugnacious style, and he argues that it has gotten results, like when House Republicans backed off plans to undercut the authority of the Office of Congressional Ethics, or major employers reversed plans to move jobs overseas after he wrote on Twitter about his disapproval.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cWith all of the jobs I am bringing back into the U.S. (even before taking office), with all of the new auto plants coming back into our country and with the massive cost reductions I have negotiated on military purchases and more, I believe the people are seeing \u2018big stuff,\u2019 \u201d Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter on Tuesday.<\/span><\/p>\n

For many years, presidents and their advisers quaked at polls that showed a drop in their ratings, fearful that it would hurt their ability to command the stage and to enact their agendas. The last two presidents governed for long stretches with less than majority support, which clearly limited their capacity to advance major legislation. But they both also demonstrated that they could still make at least some progress.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mr. Bush never had the support of more than 50 percent of Americans for nearly his entire second term and fell into the 20s before leaving office. Still, he ignored poll numbers and the opposition of Democrats to send reinforcements to Iraq to turn around a losing war.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mr. Obama never fell as far, but he went for many months below 50 percent and turned to his executive authority to enact policies on immigration and the environment. He rebounded in public standing in the last few months and will leave office at 56 percent in the NBC-Journal poll, near his highest marks.<\/span><\/p>\n

Some Republicans now say Mr. Trump has rewritten the rule book. \u201cPolling more and more is a false god,\u201d said Ron Kaufman, the White House political director under President George Bush and a longtime Republican strategist. \u201cWe all play to it, but it\u2019s a false god. I just think it\u2019s no longer reliable as a judge.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Mary Matalin, who was a top counselor to Vice President Dick Cheney, who ignored his own low approval ratings while in office to focus on advancing his national security agenda, said Mr. Trump \u201chas ushered in a new political paradigm\u201d that has upended age-old assumptions.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cTrump has exposed the inadequacy and fallibility of decades-old domestic political strategy of governing by polls and contrived expectations,\u201d she said. \u201cIn the new Trump world, it has already been proven prima facie absurd to presume personal approval numbers to be more vote-determinative than policy approval.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Source:-\u00a0https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2017\/01\/17\/us\/politics\/donald-trump-obama-approval-rating.html?_r=0<\/span><\/div>\n

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