A House Divided

Talk about a House Divided. Feature the partisan breakdown in the new Gallup polling on President Trump’s second-term approval rating. The 47th president has the approval of 91 percent of Republicans. Among Independents 46 percent approve. Among Democrats the approval rating is but 6 percent. In all, Mr. Trump’s approval rating of 47 percent is a historic low, exceeded only by Mr. Trump himself, in his first term, with 44 percent.Mr. Trump’s numbers place “him below all other elected presidents dating back to 1953,” says a senior editor at Gallup, Megan Brenan. What a contrast with, say, JFK, who in 1961 had a 72 percent approval rating in the first month of his presidency, per Gallup. Presidents Eisenhower and Obama both earned 68 percent approval ratings in their first months, and President Carter scored 66 percent. That didn’t guarantee their presidencies ended well.The low approval numbers, in any event, mark the risk for Mr. Trump of overplaying the strong hand that he was dealt by the voters. It was a decisive victory. Yet Mr. Trump earning 49.8 percent of the popular vote over a flawed opponent was hardly the kind of landslide that elevated Reagan to the presidency in 1980. That year, Reagan won 44 states in the electoral college and earned 50.7 percent of the popular vote, compared to 41 percent for Carter.The ultimate measure of the success of a presidency is not the polls at the start, but at the end, of his or her term. Reagan, after all, began his first term with just 51 percent approval. Yet his spending and tax cuts, his victory over inflation, and his unifying pro-freedom, anti-communist message led him to a landslide win in 1984, when the Gipper won 58.8 percent of the popular vote and carried every state but his opponent’s home of Minnesota.If Mr. Trump wants higher approval numbers, the Reagan strategy beckons. That would suggest a shift in strategy away from tossing red meat to Mr. Trump’s MAGA base and prioritizing the bread and butter issues that propelled his victory among independent voters. Most importantly, that means getting a grip on the scourge of inflation that his predecessor unleashed on the economy — and getting prices down on staples like groceries.Mark that under President Biden, prices surged some 20 percent on average, propelled by wasteful federal overspending and miles of new regulatory red tape. The cost of basics like bread, peanut butter, and even roast beef rose more than 40 percent. Even if inflation has slowed — it has yet to reach the Fed’s 2 percent target — the cumulative impact of those price increases are still rankling consumers with every trip to the grocery store. Indeed, if one wants to see why Americans may be so uneasy, feature how the dollar is plunging in terms of gold, the historic basis of monetary value. At one point today, the greenback was being valued at less than a 2,800th of an ounce of gold, a record low. It’s hardly a reassuring signal for an abatement in price inflation. Even worse, Mr. Trump seems to be egging on the dollar’s slide, with talk of a weaker greenback as a means of spurring American exports. Which brings us back to Gallup’s new polling. “Most presidents have experienced a ‘honeymoon period’, with strong job approval ratings in the initial months of their presidencies that then fade as time passes,” Ms. Brenan says. By re-electing Mr. Trump, though, Americans had no illusions about his personality or style of governance. They did expect him to fix the inflation crisis. Failure to do so could bode trouble for future polls — and history.

A House Divided

A House Divided

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