Donald Trump Impeachment Calls Continue, Poll Says Many Americans Want ‘Worst President Since Richard Nixon’ Impeached
It’s only been a week since Donald Trump officially took his seat at 45th President of the United States. But the results of a new national poll suggest as early as now that Trump may become the “worst president since Richard Nixon,” while many are also in favor of Trump getting impeached early on in his presidency.
A news release from Public Policy Polling suggests that as of his first week in office, Donald Trump’s approval rating is remarkably low. Voters in the PPP poll were split right down the middle, with 44 percent giving Trump a positive approval rating for his performance and another 44 percent giving him a negative one, and even with this split, PPP wrote that the numbers are “historically awful” for a newly-elected president. In a similar question, this time in relation to Trump’s favorability, 44 percent answered in the affirmative, while 50 percent saw the new president as unfavorable.
The PPP added that respondents looked more favorably toward the participants in the past weekend’s Women’s Marches, as 50 percent saw them in a good light, and 41 percent looked toward them negatively.
With regard to the question of why voters had such a poor opinion of Donald Trump, the PPP wrote that only 34 percent of voters approved of the president’s plans to build a wall on the Mexican border with American taxpayers’ money. A mere 30 percent said they are in favor of repealing former president Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act, as to 61 percent who want it retained and fine-tuned to “fix parts that aren’t working.” Trump’s perceived lack of transparency, controversies regarding his business interests in the Trump Organization, and purported ties with Russian leader Vladimir Putin were also seen as pain points by many who participated in the poll.
All in all, the PPP believes that voters are so disenchanted with the new administration that they are expecting Donald Trump to become the worst president since Richard Nixon’s time in the White House from 1969 to 1974. In fact, respondents thought that all of Trump’s predecessors after Nixon would have made better presidents, with 40 percent seeing Trump as better than Nixon and only 31 percent believing the opposite.
Regarding the much-talked-about question of whether Donald Trump should be impeached this early on into his term, the PPP’s poll showed that 35 percent were in favor, while 50 percent weren’t. This suggests a fairly large percentage of people so disappointed in Trump that they want him out of office as soon as possible and a wait-and-see attitude for most others.
Still, the PPP noted that it will closely monitor public sentiment on a possible Trump impeachment, “as long as issues like his tax returns, business interests, and ties with Russia remain unresolved.”
Commenting on the findings of the new poll, PPP President Dean Debnam said in a statement that it’s highly unusual that people would expect new president Donald Trump to be the worst since the time of Richard Nixon.
“Usually a new President comes in with voters having positive feelings and high expectations for them. Donald Trump comes in with Americans expecting him to be the worst President in 40 years from Day 1.”
With Americans seemingly pessimistic on the reality of the Trump presidency as we know it, online petitions have been gaining a lot of attention with their calls for Donald Trump’s impeachment. A new website called ImpeachTrumpNow launched in the aftermath of the president’s inauguration, stressing that Trump has been “in direct violation of the U.S. constitution” since he assumed office, and is “not above the law.”
The website comes with an online petition that has attracted 246,156 signatures as of this writing, all from people who want to see Donald Trump impeached. In addition, the site’s home page includes some interesting comments from Richard Nixon’s White House Counsel, John Dean, who was quoted as saying that he doesn’t think Nixon “even (came) close to the level of corruption we already know about Trump.”
[Featured Image by Alex Wong/Getty Images]
