We can now say that during the end of July Trump began to recover from another sustained dip in his approval rating. This is the 11th of his presidency, and like many previous dips, there was a mix of factors (I do some analysis below the summary). It was a minor dip with a score of 3 on our scale of 1-10. Read about the ranking model here.
Episode 11
Rank: 3
Decline: -1.10%
Lowest Approval: 41.3%
Range: June 23-July 28, 2018
Key Events:
- Policy: Reporting on child separation reaches critical mass; Laura Bush publishes op-ed opposing the policy; Trump issues Executive Order that reverses course; Travel ban upheld by Supreme Court; Kennedy retirement; Judge Sabraw issues injunction on separation policy and CBP ends zero-tolerance policy; Chinese trade war escalates; Pompeo has failed meeting with North Korea; Kavanaugh announcement; NATO summit and trump attacking allies; announced that 103 children under 5 have been separated; 12 Billion to farmers hurt by tariffs; Trump declares a truce in EU trade war; continued effort to reunite boarder families
- White House Chaos: Scott Pruitt resigned in scandal
- Taboos: Trump-Putin Summit and press conference in Helsinki; pushback from Republicans, and Trump tries to walk back his statements; Cohen recording of Trump agreeing to McDougal payment is released
- Russia Investigation: Mueller issues indictments of 12 GRU members
This dip answers the question of whether the child separation policy hurt Trump politically. The Laura Bush op-ed, in which she basically said the policy was racist and likened it to Japanese internment, dropped on a Sunday night June 17th; the following week there was wall-to-wall coverage of what was happening on the border. Trump’s approval dropped by .60% the following week. The pushback was so great that Trump reversed course on Wednesday June 20th, and the zero-tolerance policy that justified the separations was scrapped a week later. The first reporting on the policy was on April 20th when the New York Times got the Department of Homeland Security to admit publicly that 700 children had been taken from their parents. In those two months many administration officials from Sessions to Kelly to Nelson spoke to the media about how the policy was good and necessary. Certain reporters and newspapers would drop harrowing articles about parents who could not find their children, but the dam did not break until the Laura Bush op-ed.
The other key event that happened during this dip was the Helsinki Summit with Putin, which resulted in a .40% dip the following week. I struggled to categorize this event in the four common themes that coincide with Trump’s approval dips. It shares elements with Russia-related stories because Trump’s bizarre behavior with Putin was thought to be explained by the collusion narrative of the 2016 election. There was also some White House chaos when they tried to deal with the blowback, with explanations of double negatives and “wouldn’t” versus “would.” But at its heart, the transgression was a taboo, and it shocked people accordingly, especially conservatives. Presidents are not supposed to stand proudly with an adversary leader and publicly declare you believe him over your own intelligence chiefs. There was a reason several commentators described it as Trump’s Charlottesville moment of foreign policy, harkening back to his major taboo of the previous summer.
Despite these two major events, the dip was on the small range compared to the previous ten dips, eight of which were more sever than this one. These dips tend to coincide with a pile on of bad news cycles about a convergence of the above-mentioned trends. While this episode had that, there was also some positive news, including a win at the Supreme Court and the nomination of his second Supreme Court justice. Since he also quickly walked back the the child separation policy and the Helsinki comments, he was able to stanch the bleeding.