Episode 14
Rank: 7
Decline: 2.10%
Lowest Approval: 39.3%
Date Range: January 5-26
Key Events:
Policy: Pelosi sworn in as Speaker of the House; Democrats pass same funding bill Senate already approved; Trump Administration floats idea of declaring a national emergency to fund the border wall; Oval Office address over Shut Down; Trump walks out of meeting with democrats; Shut down becomes longest in history; Pelosi canceled the State of the Union; Trump rebuked by Pelosi on State of the Union; continued negative coverage about the shutdown, including airport strikes; Trump reopens government without getting a deal; Inspector General for DHHS reports that we will never be able to determine how many children were separated at the border; Barr confirmation hearings.
Taboos: In a performative cabinet meeting Trump spouts pro-Soviet propaganda about their invasion of Afghanistan.
Russia Investigation: We learn that Manafort gave Russians campaign data when he was campaign chair; NYTimes story about the FBI opening an counter intelligence investigation against Trump, and WaPo story about Trump concealing all notes from his meetings with Putin; Buzzfeed story about Trump directing Cohen to lie to congress, and the Special Counsel’s rebuttal; Stone indicted
Non-Russia Related Legal Troubles: Cohen says due to threats by Trump against his family he will not testify before Congress
Defections: Romney publishes critical op-ed before becoming a senator
This approval dip ranks at a 7 on the 10-point severity scale, so only 5 other dips have been as or more sever. The main drivers of this dip are clearly the shut down fight, which Trump kept loosing with every new development. Not only did the main stream news coverage focus more and more on the increasing negative effects, Trump took more and more of the blame in polling, which then got reported on and the conversation was mostly about the “Trump shut down.” His poll numbers may also have been dragged down among his base because they saw him getting routed by Pelosi in ways that could not be spun. There was also a lot of important news about the Russia investigation in these weeks.
The ground was also softened in the final weeks of December by the Mattis resignation and Cohen sentencing, which I categorize as the 13th approval dip. That dip stalled out for two weeks ,with no increase of approval, before dropping much faster and steeper (by the 4th week of the shut down there was a drop of one percentage point in one week, which has only happened 7 times in two years, and most of them at the very beginning of his presidency). For this reason I don’t count this as one dip, even though they are contiguous. The Mattis/Cohen dip would have petered out and started to increase if not for the shut down.
