Trumps unpopularity threatens to hobble his presidency [View all]

[portlander23]

Trump’s unpopularity threatens to hobble his presidency
Steven Shepard
Politico

President-elect Donald Trump will descend on Washington next month, buoyed by his upset victory and Republican control of Congress to implement his agenda.

But he’s facing a major obstacle: Trump will enter the White House as the least-popular incoming president in the modern era of public-opinion polling.

While Trump has received a boost in public opinion after his victory, he still badly lags past presidents-elect when it comes to personal favorability. Currently, his average favorable rating stands at 43 percent, according to HuffPost Pollster, while a 49-percent plurality views him unfavorably. More respondents viewed Trump unfavorably than favorably in the most recent batch of public polls from NBC News/Wall Street Journal, Suffolk University/USA Today, Fox News,CBS News and POLITICO/Morning Consult, all conducted in early- or mid-December.

“The lack of support for the president-elect means that Democrats can oppose him when they believe they should,” said Jesse Ferguson, the former Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee independent-expenditure head who worked as a spokesman for Clinton’s campaign this year. “They can be confident that there’s no pressure for them to support him out of fear of his political prowess and political power, because his coattails look a little more like a T-SHIRT.”

Is it too early to call bullshit on this theory? Trump is going to enter office with every branch of the government (SCOTUS shortly) under Republican control. The idea that a lack of a mandate or popular support will dissuade Republicans seems fantastical. The only way the Trump agenda will be slowed, legislatively, is if there's divisions in the GOP ranks for Democrats to exploit. As of today, it doesn't look like the GOP is unhappy with a Trump victory.