Only 36% of Americans approve of President Donald Trump’s performance in the Oval Office, a new Washington Post/ABC News poll has found.
That gives Trump the lowest approval rating at the six-month mark of any president in 70 years, ABC News reports.
Trump’s overall approval rating has fallen from 42% at the 100-day mark of his presidency in April compared to a Washington Post/ABC poll at that time. His disapproval rating has risen five points since then, to 58%, according to a comparison of the two polls.
The new poll also shows that 48% of Americans say they “disapprove strongly” of the President’s performance in office.
Early Sunday morning, hours after the poll was released, Trump took to Twitter to defend himself.
“The ABC/Washington Post Poll, even though almost 40% is not bad at this time, was just about the most inaccurate poll around election time!” the President tweeted.
However, the final estimate from The Washington Post-ABC News poll during the campaign was 47% for Hillary Clinton and 43% for Trump, compared with the final election results of 48.5% for Clinton to 46.4% for Trump. That means the projection for Clinton was within the poll’s margin of error of 2.5 percentage points, while the prediction for Trump was about a percentage point outside that margin of error.
The Washington Post-ABC News poll asked whether respondents thought it was appropriate or inappropriate for Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and his then-campaign manager Paul Manafort to hold a meeting with a Russian lawyer last summer on the premise of gaining information from the lawyer that would be damaging to Clinton’s campaign, which Trump Jr. revealed in emails he posted on Twitter last week.
Only 26% said holding the meeting appropriate, while 63% said it was inappropriate, according to the new poll. In addition, 60% said they believed Russia tried to influence the 2016 presidential race and 41% said they thought Trump campaign aides intentionally helped those efforts, while 44% said they believed Trump benefited from Russia’s efforts. In contrast, 31% said Russia didn’t try to influence the election and just 14% said Trump aides didn’t help or Trump didn’t benefit from Moscow’s efforts.
The poll also found that 63% of respondents said it was more important for the federal government to provide health care to low-income Americans than cut taxes, while 27% said it was more important to reduce taxes than provide that care. The poll also found that half of those surveyed preferred Obamacare to the GOP plan to replace it, while only 24% preferred the Republican plan.
On Trump’s international influence, 48% said they see the United States’ leadership in the world as getting weaker since Trump took office, compared with 27% who say it has grown stronger and 23% who say it has stayed about the same.
Only 34% of respondents said they trust Trump either a great deal or a good amount to conduct negotiations on America’s behalf with foreign leaders, while 47% said they don’t trust him to do so. Narrowing in on Trump’s negotiations with Russian President Vladimir Putin, 19% said they trust Trump to handle such talks, while 48% said they do not trust Trump in that regard.
The poll was conducted from July 10 to 13 in both English and Spanish among a random sample of 1,001 adults and has a +/- 3.5 percentage point margin of error. The pollsters dialed numbers from samples of both landlines and cell phones.
