Via Gallup, here’s the latest look at approval levels of Donald Trump and three other recent presidents¹ during their first year in office:
It’s worth noting that Trump’s decline is pretty normal. On average, the other three presidents declined from 58.7 percent approval to 50 percent approval by this time in their first term. That’s a drop of 8.7 percentage points.
Trump has declined from 45 percent approval to 36 percent approval. That’s 9 percentage points.
Despite everything, Trump’s performance has been completely average. The big difference is that he started office with an historically low approval rate. Since then, nothing unusual has happened.
¹You can’t use George W. Bush in this kind of comparison because his job approval spiked massively after 9/11. Nor can you use George H.W. Bush since his first term was essentially the ninth year of the Reagan/Bush administration. So I used Reagan instead.
