Donald Trump has reached a new height of approval as US president according to a new opinion poll, laying bare the dissonance between the majority of the US electorate and the international interpretation of his first three weeks in office.
In the poll for CBS News, Mr Trump received an overall job approval rating of 53 per cent, while 70 per cent of respondents agreed that he was delivering on his campaign promises.
Presented with a list of attributes, 69 per cent of respondents described Mr Trump as “tough” and 63 per cent as “energetic”. But a significant majority - 66 per cent – felt Mr Trump was not doing enough to tackle high prices, which was one of his key campaign promises.
There was also broad support for one of the most controversial aspects of Mr Trump’s governance: the overarching influence and access of Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency. Mr Trump asserted at the weekend that he had full faith in Mr Musk and would continue to direct him to focus on federal behemoths, from the Department of Education to the Pentagon, to lay bare inefficiencies and wastefulness.
The majority felt that Mr Musk should have either “a lot” (23 per cent) or “some” (28 per cent) influence on government operations.
In an interview that aired before the Super Bowl in New Orleans on Sunday, which he attended, Mr Trump said in relation to the dismantling of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), “I don’t know if its kickbacks or what’s going on.
“But I ran on this, and the people want me to find it. I have a great help, Elon Musk, who has been terrific. He’s not gaining anything. In fact, I wonder how he can devote the time to it. He’s so into it. But I told him to do that, and then I’m going to tell him very soon to go check the Department of Education. He’s going to find the same thing. Then I’m going to tell him to check the military. We are going to find billions, hundreds of billions of dollars in fraud and abuse. And the people elected me on that.”
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The CBS poll reflects the breakneck speed of change and revocation of the Biden administrative norms over the first three weeks, from the imposition of tariffs to the lightning dismantling of USAID, to the imminent gutting of the federal workforce.
The poll found that the least popular of the foreign policy ideas that Mr Trump has floated, including acquiring Greenland and the Panama Canal, is his suggestion, voiced during last week’s visit to Washington of Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, that the US take over Gaza. Only 13 per cent of those polled agreed this was a “good idea”. Nearly half of respondents − 47 per cent − expressed opposition to the idea.
The CBS approval rating echoes similar polls in returning a generally favourable response to Mr Trump’s opening month in office. It stands in stark contrast to the alarm Democratic voices have been sounding and the warnings offered by constitutional scholars about measures taken by the president.
In a New York Times report on Monday, a number of legal scholars said they considered the United States to have already entered a state of constitutional crisis.
“There have been so many unconstitutional and illegal actions in the first 18 days of the Trump presidency,” Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of law at the University of California at Berkeley said.
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