At this point in his presidency, polling only 24 percent approval, Richard Nixon was only days away from boarding Air Force One and returning to his home in San Clemente as an ex-president. He resigned over the Watergate scandal and imminent impeachment, the only president ever to quit his job.
Donald Trump, who wouldn’t resign if his polling numbers were minus-24, now averages out at the mid-30s in recent polling, though he attributes all of this to the Fake News media. On Truth Social, he wrote (caps all his): “MY REAL POLL NUMBERS ARE THE HIGHEST THEY HAVE EVER BEEN.”
Trump has the support of just 34 percent of Americans in CNN’s latest poll, matching his lowest point just after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. He has the approval of just 33 percent in a new AP-NORC survey, tying his lowest since 2017, and 32 percent in Quinnipiac University data, falling to an all-time low in that poll.
At year two in their second term, Bill Clinton stood at 64 percent, Ronald Reagan at 61, Dwight Eisenhower at 58, Barack Obama at 43, Harry Truman at 39, and George W. Bush at 37. Both Truman and Bush were engaged in wars at the time, as is Trump today. Nixon was not engaged in any war and set the record at 24 percent, the lowest since polling began.
