Trump’s political power is still a mysterious force to many, and so it gets inflated in the partisan imagination. Liberals think it’s horrifying that half the country loves Trump and will follow him wherever he leads (only 26% strongly approve of the job Trump is doing). Trump supporters think it’s too bad that half the country hates him (only 41% strongly disapprove of Trump), but they probably do not think too much about his unpopularity and the reasons for it.
Because the laws of political gravity did not seem to apply to Trump in 2016, there is a tendency to reject the voices that say they will apply to him in 2018. The presidential job approval number is a measure of political gravity, and by now we can draw some conclusions. I wanted to understand and quantify why Trump’s approval declines when it does. If you are a Trump critic, consuming a news and internet diet where everything Trump does gets dialed to 100 on the Rage’o’Meter, it’s useful to know what presidential actions and issues actually register disapproval among the broader public. If you are a Trump supporter, it’s good to know what doesn’t work politically so your preferred candidates can shape a strategy that will continue to win arguments and elections.
What follows is how I measured and quantified the periods of Trump’s presidency where he lost public support for the job he is doing.
First I identified significant and/or sustained dips in the approval rating (my source is the FiveThirtyEight.com Trump Approval tracker, which is an aggregate of all job approval polls). In keeping with Trump’s reality TV background, I am calling each downturn an “episode.”
There have been ten episodes where approval has declined in Trump’s presidency. Some represent large declines, some are small. (As of this writing we appear to be in the middle of an eleventh episode.)
To define an episode, I take a weekly snapshot (on Saturday night) of the job approval number. In any given span of weeks, there are clear periods when approval is gaining (see Week 54-56 in the table below) or dropping (see Weeks 57 and 60). I begin the measure for a downturn episode with the job approval number of the week just before the downturn begins, and then I compare that to the number at the lowest week before the number starts to tick back up again (and it always will tick up due to the concept of ‘regression to the mean’). In the table below, the episode covers the drop from 41.4% approval to 40.2%–a significant decline of 1.20%. In week 61 the approval began to tick up, and by week 67 Trump had recovered all lost ground and achieved a job approval of 42.10%.
| Week 54 | 40.20% | 1.40% | |
| Week 55 | 40.80% | 0.60% | |
| Week 56 | 41.40% | 0.60% | |
| Week 57 | 40.00% | -1.40% | |
| Week 58 | 40.40% | 0.40% | |
| Week 59 | 40.70% | 0.30% | |
| Week 60 | 40.20% | -0.50% | -1.20% |
The question to ask is what happened in the country between weeks 56 and 60 that accounts for the decline? But before we get to that, we have to ask another question: how bad is a 1.20% drop?
To answer this I created a ranking system of 1-10 to measure how significant the decline is for each episode. There are two factors: how large is the decline? and what is the lowest number the approval rating hits before it ticks back up?
For the ten episodes, the largest and smallest decline is 4.10% and .70% respectively. Trump’s highest and lowest rating is around 44.8% and 36.4% respectively. For both of these factors I divided them into five ranges and assigned points to each. For Approval Decline, the number of points increase as the decline increases, meaning that a decline is more severe the more percentage points Trump loses. For Approval Range, the number of points increase as the approval gets closer to the bottom of the range–this accounts for the fact that an approval decline is more significant if it dips into the mid-30s than if it dips into the low-40s. It is easy to lose support if close to half of the country already supports you; it is harder to lose support if most moderates have already fled and you are down to your core supporters.
| Approval Decline: | Rank: | Approval Range: | Rank: |
| 0.70-1.39% | 1 | 43.0-44.80% | 1 |
| 1.40-2.09% | 2 | 41.30-42.99% | 2 |
| 2.10-2.79% | 3 | 39.55-41.29% | 3 |
| 2.80-3.49% | 4 | 37.80-39.54% | 4 |
| 3.50-4.20% | 5 | 36.0-37.79% | 5 |
Finally, I add these two factors together for each episode to create a total score. For example, Episode 1 has a decline of 1.80% and bottoms out at 43%, which earns it a score of 3. Episode 5 has a decline of ‘only’ .90% but bottoms out at 36.9%, which earns it a score of 6. See scores for each episode below.
Now we can look at what was going on politically during the weeks of each decline. I used my own weekly diary of news reports. Wikipedia also has a good list of weekly events in the Trump presidency. The prevalent events in each episode can be grouped into four trends:
- Policy actions or discussion (Obamacare Repeal, tax bill, travel ban, etc)
- White House chaos stories (staff infighting, spats, flubbed events, staff firings, etc)
- Trump Taboos (Charlottesville, Stormy Daniels, Roy Moore, etc)
- Russia investigation (Comey firing; Mueller indictments and guilty pleas, etc)
I will write future blog posts about which of these has more impact on job approval than others. But for now I will let you be the judge. Below is the ranked list of episodes where Trump earned his steepest job approval declines, and the events that coincided with those downturns.
Note that the episodes are labeled in chronological order, but are listed below in order of severity.
Most Severe Dips (Rank 7-9)
Episode 3
Rank: 9
Decline: -4.10%
Lowest Approval: 38.10%
Key Events:
- Policy: House approves Obamacare repeal; Travel Ban blocked by courts; Trump withdraws form Paris Climate Accord
- Russia Investigation: Trump fires Comey; meets with Russians in Oval Office; Continuing fallout over Comey and Russia meeting; Mueller appointed; News about Kushner’s request for back channel with Russia; Comey testifies before Congress about his firing.
Episode 4
Rank: 8
Decline: -2.70%
Lowest Approval: 37%
Key Events:
- Policy: SCOTUS reinstates travel ban; Trump announces transgender military ban; McCain sinks Obamacare repeal.
- White House Chaos: Scaramucci hired; Spicer resigns; Prebius replaced by Kelly; Scaramucci fired.
- Russia Investigation: First Trump-Putin meeting; a follow up dinner meeting without Americans present; News breaks about Manafort/Kushner Trump Tower meeting; Kushner testifies before Congress, denies collusion
Episode 2
Rank: 7
Decline: -3.90%
Lowest Approval: 40.40%
Key Events:
- Policy: Ryan introduces Obamacare repeal; CBO score released (24 million lose insurance); it fails to pass House; White House releases its budget.
- Taboos: Trump claims Obama wiretapped Trump Tower; congressional Republicans call on him to retract; Comey says there is no evidence
- Russia Investigation: Comey announces there is an investigation of the Trump campaign; Nunes forced to recuse himself from the House investigation due to his secret cooperation with the White House
Episode 7
Rank: 7
Decline: -2.00%
Lowest Approval: 36.40%
Key Events:
- Taboos: Trump defends Roy Moore; Trump endorses Moore; Moore loses election
- Russia Investigation: Trump talks to Putin on phone; Flynn guilty plea
Mid-Range Dips (Rank 4-6)
Episode 5
Rank: 6
Decline : -0.90%
Lowest Approval: 36.90%
Key Event:
- Taboos: Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville and Trump’s response.
Episode 8
Rank: 5
Decline:-0.70%
Lowest Approval:38.80%
Key Events:
- Policy: government shut down build up (Schumer meeting); three-day government shut down
- Taboos: Trump’s “shit hole countries” comment fallout; Stormy Daniels news breaks.
- Russia Investigation: Bannon testifies with White House interference in the congressional questioning; news breaks that Trump tried to fire Mueller in June; news about Sessions pressuring FBI, Trump wanting to fire Rosenstein, and a sit down for Mueller interview.
Episode 9
Rank: 4
Decline: -1.20%
Lowest Approval: 40.20%
Key Events:
- Policy: Parkland families at White House; Trump-Kim summit announced; Trump starts tariffs.
- Taboos: Michael Cohen admits to paying Stormy Daniels just before election.
- Russia Investigation: Mueller’s 16 indictments of Russian nationals and continued negative stories about Trump and Russia; Rick Gates pleads guilty; House ends its Russia investigation.
Least Severe Dips (1-3)
Episode 1
Rank: 3
Decline: -0.80%
Lowest Approval: 41.60%
Key Events:
- Policy: Trump admin opened Israeli embassy; Kim threats to pull out of summit; China trade negotiations break down; Trump cancels North Korea summit; continuing stories of child separation at US-Mexico border; Trump accelerates trade war on allies; Trump says North Korea summit is back on; D’Souza pardon; Sessions publicly pushes child separation policy; more stories from the border; reports from the G7 summit and Trump bickering with allies.
- Taboos: news about Trump’s retainer payment to Cohen, and continued story of leaks of Cohen’s financial records; Kushner meeting with non-Russian nationals about securing financial deals.
- Russia Investigation: Senate Intelligence Committee releases records and says they agree with the findings of the Intelligence Community that Russia interfered to help Trump win the election; Crossfire Hurricane story in New York Times about how the Russia FBI investigation began; ongoing Nunes attempt to out FBI informant; Continuing pressure for DOJ/FBI to give docs to Congress; Manafort goes to jail.
Episode 10
Rank: 3
Decline: -1.80%
Lowest Approval: 43%
Key Events:
- Policy: Travel Ban Executive Order and implementation; airport protests.
- White House Chaos: Trump’s TV habits; staff infighting; need for more effective structure; Australia prime minister phone call, which McCain had to apologize for.
- Taboos: Trump’s moral equivalence between US and Russia to Bill O’Reilly.
- Russia Investigation: Flynn is fired from job as National Security Advisor.