| MTZehvor said: One thing that may be worth keeping in mind is that those presidents tended to have substantially lower disapproval ratings as well; in other words, fewer people were openly unhappy with the job they were doing when compared to Trump. As something of a breakdown of the three presidents mentioned, during each of their second years in office, here's how many ten day (give or take, sometimes it's not entirely consistent) periods they had disapproval ratings of 50% or higher (citing UCSB here) Jimmy Carter: 0 Ronald Raegan: 1 Bill Clinton: 8 By comparison, Donald Trump had already accumulated 15 of those such periods by May of his second year (sadly there aren't any statistics past that point yet). If you're willing to look to other polling aggregate sites such as Five Thirty Eight to try and put together a picture of his disapproval rating since then, his disapproval rating hasn't been below 50% since March of this year; a five month span. Between the other three presidents combined, there was only one span where any of them went more than a month with a disapproval rating of 50% or more in their first two years, and that lasted for just over two months. I think the story here may be more of Americans being more willing to pick a side on Trump rather than the media just misrepresenting things. In our current climate of greater political divisiveness, people are more likely to form an opinion rather than stay out of the fray, which can be good for political participation, but also leads to uninformed opinions in many cases. |
Trump could walk into every single person house in America and give every person a million dollars cash and cure cancer and still 50% of the country would think he is the next Hitler.
Our country has become such a hateful partisanship place that looking at past ratings versus now is meaningless.
