Watch: Trump Has Broken George W. Bush and Obama's 2nd Term Approval Numbers, Despite 95 Percent of the Media Trashing Him Daily
When 95 percent of the media trashes you daily, it’s pretty miraculous if 95 percent of the people don’t reflexively hate you.
Instead, for President Donald Trump, he actually has the highest approval rating at this time of the second term of any president in the 21st century.
As Fox News noted on Thursday, Trump’s RealClearPolitics polling average for March 5 in the second year of a second term was actually above that of George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
Trump is at 43.3 percent approval, vs. 42.5 for Obama and 36.7 for Bush.
Watch: The latest polling shows Trump is beating George W. Bush and Barack Obama’s job approval numbers at the same points in their second terms.pic.twitter.com/1BzwbP59x0
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And, perhaps most importantly, Trump began his second term behind Obama and roughly equivalent with Bush as of his second inauguration.
Now, it’s worth noting that Bush had significant headwinds at this point in his presidency, both with Iraq turning into a quagmire on him and his failure to privatize Social Security on the home front.
However, Bush fell from a much higher apex. Arguably, he was the last president to enjoy sustained bipartisan support in the years immediately following 9/11 and the Afghanistan invasion, and there was still the residual belief in 2006 that he was the last line of defense keeping us from another Al-Qaida attack.
Obama’s presidential standing, meanwhile, wasn’t so much affected by any one thing as the agglomeration of issues that occurs over the eight years of a normal presidency. The second term of the 44th presidency was pretty much a gentle downhill where not much got accomplished, especially when one considers how much the media loved the guy.
Now, of course, this comes with a caveat: Both Bush and Obama got thumped in the midterms, something that Trump has to avoid.
To a certain extent, however, there are major differences between where the three 21st century presidents to serve two terms found themselves on March 5 of the second year of their second term.
First and foremost, you don’t have two consecutive terms; we’ve had a Democratic presidency in between Trump 45 and Trump 47, and that provides a template to run against, since nobody really wants that again.
Then there’s the matter of entropy. Bush and Obama ran out of steam in part because there was nothing left for them to do aside from shoring up projects begun earlier in their presidency. Trump, meanwhile, seems to be getting the hang of how to negotiate around the swamp as opposed to getting along with it, and his movement on issues like Iran shows it.
And finally, and most importantly, Trump’s approval is, in large part, influenced by media perception. They loathe the guy and it shows.
And yet, his approval rating is still above a guy who was loved (Obama) or tolerated (Dubya). If Trump got that kind of coverage, he would be obliterating approval records daily.
Now, where it goes from here is another thing entirely. The point remains that, for all the nasty talk about Donald Trump and those insisting that the sky is falling, it’s not.
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