Donald J. Trump: The 'Least Popular First-Year President on Record'

As AP reports, President Donald Trump's "job approval rating sits at just 32 percent, making him the least popular first-year president on record. A quarter of Republicans say they're among those who disapprove of the president." (Image: DonkeyHotey/flickr/cc)

Donald J. Trump: The 'Least Popular First-Year President on Record'

With just 32% approval rating, new AP-ORC poll shows Americans wildly pessimistic about president's performance—and nation's future—as first year comes to a close

With more than two-thirds of all Americans now disapproving of the job performance of President Donald Trump, a new poll out Saturday shows that he is now the most unpopular U.S. president during his first year in office since surveys of this kind have been taken.

Conducted by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, the poll shows that a majority of Americans now hold "a broadly pessimistic view of Trump's presidency, the nation's politics and the overall direction of the country." Only three out of ten respondents said the U.S. is "heading in the right direction" while a bipartian majority, 52 percent, said the "country is worse off since Trump became president."

As AP reports, "Trump's job approval rating sits at just 32 percent, making him the least popular first-year president on record. A quarter of Republicans say they're among those who disapprove of the president."

That falling support among GOP voters, according to Eric Lutz at Mic.com, means that Trump's overall dismal approval rating is not even the worst news facing the president--his increasingly poor standing with his base is.

Another key metric, a sense of national unity, was explored in the poll but the findings were not inspiring on that score either. Of those surveyed, only 9 percent think the country has become more united since Trump was elected, while 67 percent think the country is more divided because of his leadership. By contrast, only 44 percent of Americans, in a poll taken last year, said that Obama's presidency had made the country more divided.

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