President Donald Trump, the consummate showman, is shining a spotlight on his primetime address Tuesday to a joint session of Congress.
‘TOMORROW NIGHT WILL BE BIG. I WILL TELL IT LIKE IT IS!,’ the president touted in a social media post on Monday ahead of his first major speech to Congress during his second presidential administration.
As Trump prepares for his address, he’s in a stronger polling position than where he found himself eight years ago when he first entered the White House.
A national survey released Monday by Marist College for PBS News and NPR indicated Trump at 45% approval and 49% disapproval. And a survey from CNN released on Sunday put the president’s approval rating at 48%, with 52% disapproving. Both surveys were conducted last week.
But Trump’s approval ratings are slightly above water in other new polls, including one for CBS News that was also conducted in recent days and released over the weekend.
Trump has kept up a frenetic pace during his opening six weeks back in the White House with an avalanche of executive orders and actions. His moves not only fulfilled some of his major campaign trail promises, but also allowed the returning president to flex his executive muscles, quickly put his stamp on the federal government, make major cuts to the federal workforce, and also settle some long-standing grievances.
Trump as of Monday had signed 81 executive orders since his Jan. 20 inauguration, according to a count from Fox News, which far surpasses the rate of any recent presidential predecessors during their first weeks in office.
‘Best Opening Month of any President in history,’ Trump wrote in a social media post last week, as he touted his accomplishments.
Expect Trump in his address to Congress and the nation to showcase the moves – many of them controversial – that he’s taken so far. That includes a high-profile crackdown on immigration, threatening tariffs on major trading partners, including Canada and Mexico, and upending the nation’s international agenda and freezing foreign aid.
‘We’re seeing a president who is certainly back in the realm of major controversy just over a month since he took the oath of office. And it’s been a flooding-of-the-zone here every day, often multiple times a day,’ Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, told Fox News Digital.
Miringoff noted, ‘We’re just seeing a lot of things happening with little time for the public to digest. The net effect of it all is there’s a sense, on the part of the public, that some things are moving just a little too fast.’
An average of all the most recent national polls indicates the president’s approval ratings are just above water. But Trump’s seen his numbers edge down slightly since returning to the White House in late January, when an average of his polls indicated the president’s approval rating in the low 50s and his disapproval in the mid 40s.
‘The honeymoon is over, and he’s actually governing, and that typically does bring numbers down,’ veteran political scientist Wayne Lesperance, the president of New Hampshire-based New England College, told Fox News Digital. ‘I expect the numbers to continue to slip as the changes in Washington really do begin to impact people’s everyday lives.’
It’s no surprise that the polls indicate a massive partisan divide over Trump’s performance. In the CNN survey, 90% of Republicans gave Trump a thumbs up, while nine out of 10 Democrats disapproved of the job he’s been doing. Independents by a 59%-41% margin disapproved.
While Trump’s approval ratings for his second term are an improvement from his first term – he started in 2017 in negative territory and remained underwater throughout his tenure in the White House – his numbers are below where former President Joe Biden began his single term in office.
Biden’s approval rating hovered in the low to mid 50s during his first six months in the White House, with his disapproval in the upper 30s to low to mid 40s.
However, Biden’s numbers sank into negative territory in the late summer and autumn of 2021, in the wake of his much-criticized handling of the turbulent U.S. exit from Afghanistan and amid soaring inflation and a surge of migrants crossing into the U.S. along the nation’s southern border with Mexico.
Biden’s approval ratings stayed underwater throughout the rest of his presidency.