The Situation: The President’s Approval Rating Takes a Hit

The Situation on Monday evaluated what, if anything, the government shutdown might be said to have accomplished. 

In that column, I noted that President Trump appears to have taken a notable political hit over the last few weeks, at least as measured by opinion polling.

Nate Silver’s favorability average for the president has continued to worsen in the days since I wrote that column. It looks like this:

For those who, for whatever reason, hate Silver—as so many people seem to do—other polling averages show a similar effect. Here’s the Real Clear Politics graph:

And here’s the polling average compiled by G. Elliott Morris:

The details vary according to the aggregators’ specific methodology, but the overall picture is the same. Trump’s approval rating has hovered for months at a stable floor in the low forties, and then, over the last month, has fallen through that floor for the first time in his second term.

I am not a political analyst or a public opinion analyst, so I’m not going to speculate about what lies behind the slippage. Is it caused by the shutdown? By persistently high prices? By rising health care premiums? By the Epstein stuff? I don’t know.

Is it persistent and the beginning of a George W. Bush-like freefall in the second term, or is it a momentary blip from which Trump will recover? I don’t know that either.

What does it mean for the midterms? That I also don’t know—except that it doesn’t mean anything good for Trump and the Republicans. 

Here’s what I do know: The Situation looks very different when the president is popular than when he is not. The Situation looks different when that approval curve is rising than when it is falling. And The Situation looks different when Republicans are winning off-year elections than when they are losing them.

In his famous concurrence in Youngstown Sheet & Tube, Justice Robert Jackson framed executive power as at its apogee when the president acts with the backing of Congress, at a kind of middle level when Congress has not spoken on a matter, and at its “lowest ebb” when the president acts in the face of a congressional enactment.

One might say something similar about presidential political power and his political popularity. When the president is popular, he has the wind at his back for all sorts of things. Members of Congress have to think hard about crossing him. Those who might wish to succeed him have to drape themselves in his legacy and show no daylight between them and him. The press cuts him all kinds of slack about all kinds of things—attributing every success to tactical or strategic judgment. Even the courts have to think twice, or three times, about blocking his actions, because who are mere unelected judges to question the authority of one official elected to represent all Americans?

But as composer Jimmie Cox put it, “Nobody knows you when you’re down and out.” 

And The Situation with an unpopular president may be a very different affair.

Will members of Congress quite so slavishly follow the president’s will with his popularity falling, with them on the ballot in the next year and thus exposed to voter retaliation, and with Trump not similarly exposed? 

Will Trump’s would-be successors be quite so eager to present themselves as the futures of Trumpism if his approval hovers, say, in the mid-30s, rather than in the mid-40s? That’s where George W. Bush finished his presidency, and John McCain didn’t exactly run as an heir to his tenure.

Will the courts be quite so deferential to claims of presidential authority, particularly claims predicated on farcical factual claims and tenuous legal theories if the man asking for deference on these claims represents 35 percent of the electorate?

These questions don’t have simple answers. They operate mostly subconsciously in the minds of a diffuse set of actors around the country. But they really matter.

Nearly every aspect of The Situation relies, to one degree or another, on the president’s political power, which is predicated on the fierce loyalty of millions of voters. The lower that floor goes, the less political power he has. And while this does not affect the formal powers of the presidency, it does affect the way people interact with those formal powers. Ask yourself a few thought-experiment type questions:

• Do you think more universities would be willing to fight a president with a 35 percent approval rating than were willing to fight Trump when his approval averaged around 45 percent?
• What about law firms?
• Do you imagine that President Trump would have had quite such an easy time confirming his unfathomably inappropriate cabinet as he did a few months back with an approval rating three, five, seven, or ten points lower than it was then?
• Do you think it’s easier or harder for a judge to rule that a U.S. attorney was improperly appointed—and for an appeals court to uphold such a ruling—when the president who appointed her is riding high in the polls or when he is losing governorships and sinking in the polls? 

Being unpopular does something else: It reduces public fear of protests and expressions of dissent. It is probably not a coincidence that the president’s decline in popularity is coinciding with a flourishing of protest movements against him. An estimated seven million people turned out for the latest “No Kings” protests. By contrast, protests at the beginning of the administration were relatively meager.

Being unpopular adds friction to everything. It makes it easier to oppose you. It makes it harder to exercise power.

So far, the decline in Trump’s approval rating has been modest. He is not in freefall. He has dipped a couple of points below his previous floor, and he appears to be on a downward trajectory.

Perhaps the end of the government shutdown will arrest that. 

The point is that the powers of the presidency—whatever they might teach in law school—are not a static function of a person holding the office. They are highly calibrated by factors like personal prestige and electoral viability. When you’re on a winning streak, the waters part for you. When you’re on a losing streak, by contrast, you’re swimming against the current, and you get reminder after reminder that there are legal and political limits to your power everywhere you turn.

So while The Situation continues tomorrow, it does so with fewer degrees of freedom.