Majority of Americans Unconvinced Trump Can Handle Nation's Top Job

Published on

Monday, January 02, 2017

by

Common Dreams

New Gallup survey shows historically low confidence that person elected will be able to effectively perform key presidential duties

by

Jon Queally, staff writer

 44 Comments

Protesters near the Trump Tower in Chicago last year. According to results released by Gallup on Monday, less than half of Americans are confident in Donald Trump's ability to handle an international crisis (46%), to use military force wisely (47%) or to prevent major scandals in his administration (44%). (Photo: Paul Beaty/AFP/Getty)

With his inauguration now less than three weeks away, a new survey shows a majority of the American people are far from confident that Donald Trump, a former reality television star who won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, is up to the major tasks entrusted to the President of the United States.

According to results released by Gallup on Monday, "less than half of Americans are confident in [Trump's] ability to handle an international crisis (46%), to use military force wisely (47%) or to prevent major scandals in his administration (44%)."

Those numbers are far lower than measures taken on Trump's most recent predecessors—Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton—all of whom had percentages close to 70% in each of those categories prior to their taking office.

Even in areas where those polled expressed higher confidence in Trump, he still came up with much lower ratings than those who came before him.

As this breakdown shows:

As Gallup notes, these figures are consistent with other polling showing Trump with historically low overall approval ratings both before and since his election victory.

Last month, a separate Gallup poll found that people also had a historically low approval of how President-elect Trump was handling his transition, a figure that is normally higher than overall approval numbers.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribu