Trump is the most unpopular president in more than 70 years. Sorry, MAGA. | Opinion
The findings don't come from some conspiratorially motivated business but from long-established pollsters.
Where is co-president Elon Musk and his snotnosed band of pubescent hackers when Donald Trump needs them?
You’d have thought that with all the whiz-bang computer skills Musk claims his nerd bros possess, they’d have been able to weasel their way into the data collection systems of some big-time pollsters and jack up the numbers for the co-commander in chief.
But I guess not.
Because it ain’t good news.
According to the most recent Gallup poll, Trump is the least popular president in more than 70 years.
Or, as the company put it on its website: “Trump’s job approval rating is 15 points below the historical average for all other elected presidents in mid-February since 1953.”
Two polls show the same low Trump approval rating
Gallup continues: “Bill Clinton has the next lowest mid-February rating for a newly inaugurated president ‒ which, at 51%, is six points higher than where Trump is now. John Kennedy (72%) and Jimmy Carter (71%) were the highest rated at this point in their presidencies.”
Ouch!
Six percentage points below Clinton puts Trump’s approval rating at – wait for it – 45%.
And just when you’d like to brush that off as fake news (knowing, of course, that Trump will try to do that anyway), another big poll comes out with – you guessed it – the same number.
A Washington Post/Ipsos poll also finds that only 45% of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing.
And for Elon, the numbers are much worse.
Elon Musk's approval rating is even worse
Only 34% approve of what Musk is doing in his non-elected job. Only 26% are OK with him shutting down government programs he thinks are unnecessary.
And a whopping 63% don’t like Musk’s marauders gaining access to federal government databases containing Social Security, Medicare and tax information.
In addition to all that, more than half of Americans, 57%, say Trump has exceeded his authority since taking office.
And all this is before Americans have begun to feel the potential harm that could be done to their health, their safety and their pocketbooks by the wholesale slashing of government agencies that is going on under Musk’s watch and with Trump’s approval.
Americans are already sick of the chainsaw routine
And Musk is bragging about it.
He took to the stage on Thursday at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington, D.C., wildly waving a chainsaw.
Ask yourself this: Exactly how comfortable would you feel if the boss at the company where you worked invited some random guy with a completely different business background to improve your company’s efficiency, and he entered the office like that?
EJ Montini is a columnist at the Arizona Republic, where this column originally ran. Reach him at ed.montini@arizonarepublic.com