Donald Trump’s transition period approval rating is in the toilet already

| 9:09 am EST December 12, 2024
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I’ve talked a lot lately about how the real battle right now is to drive Trump’s approval rating as low as possible before he even takes office. Why? Because a president’s approval rating, more than any other factor, dictates how much or little political power a president has.

A president usually enters office with a fairly high approval rating, mainly because the people in the middle try to give any new president the initial benefit of the doubt in the hope that things will go well. Then sometime after taking office, some of the people in the middle start to give up hope about the new president, and the approval rating starts to falter. That’s the point at which a president’s biggest political priorities start to lose steam.

For reference, just before President Joe Biden took office, his transition period approval rating was 68%. That’s the kind of number you see when mainstream Americans have real hope and enthusiasm for an incoming president. It’s important to understand this in context, because when I tell you that Donald Trump’s current transition period approval rating is just 54%, that’s very low. Very low.

I know, I know. I can already hear some of you banging away on your keyboards writing angry defeatist comments about how it shouldn’t be anywhere near as high as 54%. But as always, such angry defeatism misses the point and squanders the opportunity. Trump’s transition period approval rating is very low within historical context. It means people in the middle are already giving up on him. Yes, these are the same idiots in the middle who just voted for him. But they only did so because the media falsely insisted Trump was cognitively competent and was going to magically fix everything. Instead they’re quickly seeing that Trump is senile, missing in action, and making utterly asinine cabinet picks that signal he has no idea what he’s even trying to do.

So yeah, Trump is in serious trouble with an approval rating that’s already all the way down to 54% a month and a half before he’s even set to take office. It should be ten or fifteen points higher than that. It sets the stage for Trump’s approval rating to drop even lower before he takes office, and then drop much lower after he’s in office. And again, when it comes to how much or little power a president has for carrying out an agenda, approval rating is everything.