Trump leaving office with historically low approval rating
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Mr Trump's high point in the Gallup survey came early last year, following his acquittal by the Senate in his first impeachment trial.
PHOTO: AFP
WASHINGTON • US President Donald Trump's approval rating has dropped to 34 per cent in a Gallup poll, the low point of a presidency that already had the weakest average approval rating of any of his predecessors since the survey began in the 1940s.
The new Gallup numbers released on Monday, based on a poll that began just before the assault on the Capitol on Jan 6, show Mr Trump's approval rating falling 12 percentage points since before the Nov 3 election.
The drop mirrors other polls that show a significant loss of support in the final two weeks of his presidency, which included not only the riot he egged on but also the unprecedented second impeachment.
The RealClearPolitics average of polls shows Mr Trump with a 39.8 per cent approval rating, down 4 percentage points since the Capitol attack.
Gallup's numbers give the most historical perspective, measuring Mr Trump against his last 12 predecessors, going back to Harry Truman.
Mr Trump's final approval rating of 34 per cent is the same received by presidents George W. Bush and Jimmy Carter in their final Gallup polls. Truman had the lowest at 32 per cent. President Barack Obama left office with a 59 per cent approval rating.
Mr Trump's average approval rating across his term, 41.1 per cent, is the lowest measured by Gallup, 4 percentage points lower than Truman's.
Mr Trump's approval numbers are also characterised by highly polarised views of his presidency. The Gallup poll shows that he gets positive ratings from 4 per cent of Democrats, 30 per cent of independents and 82 per cent of Republicans - a gap of 78 percentage points.
Meanwhile, Mr Trump's permanent ban from Twitter helped eliminate huge clouds of misinformation that were polluting social-media networks, according to new research. From Jan 9 to 15, misinformation about election fraud on social networks plummeted around 73 per cent, from 2.5 million to 688,000 posts, according to data from social-analytics firm Zignal Labs, as cited by a Washington Post report.
That came after Twitter finally banned Mr Trump on Jan 8, with the company citing the risk of "further incitement of violence" after the deadly attack on the US Capitol by pro-Trump rioters, Variety.com reported.
After Mr Trump posted a video tweet on Jan 6 telling the mob, "We love you, you're very special", he also said in a tweet (which Twitter quickly removed) that "these are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long".
BLOOMBERG
