Trump Defies the Law of Presidential Approval Ratings

Donald Trump’s presidency has broken just about every conventional rule of American politics, but this one’s a doozy: Almost every other first-term president who’s had an economy this strong has also had an approval rating above 50 percent. Trump’s? It’s at about 38 percent, according to an average of three polls released this week by CNN, Quinnipiac University, and NPR/Marist.

Despite a healthy August jobs report, an economy that’s the strongest it’s been in more than a decade, unemployment hovering at 3.9 percent (), and the , in recent weeks Trump’s approval numbers have just. They’re significantly lower than former President Barack Obama’s approval rating at the height of the Great Recession in the fall of 2009, which even as nearly 10 percent of Americans were unemployed.