House Speaker Mike Johnson dropped some jaws to the floor by suggesting Donald Trump is currently netting ratings that’d make a North Korean despot blush.
“The president is the most maligned and attacked political figure in the history of American politics,” he told CNBC. “But he’s also the most resilient. You see at the same time, his approval ratings are skyrocketing.”
“CNN had a story, I think a day or two ago, he was at 90 percent approval rating,” Johnson added. “There’s never been a president that high!”
He’s half-right. There has indeed, throughout the history of the United States, never once been a president who secured approval ratings even remotely near that number, being closer to the kind of figures you might expect to see from deeply repressive totalitarian countries like China, Azerbaijan, or Belarus.
In fact, the president’s approval ratings have plummeted to a miserable 44 percent, according to data guru Nate Silver. The slumping ratings come in the wake of public backlash to the Department of Justice and the FBI concluding that disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein kept no “client list” and that he died by suicide while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges in 2019. The news has sent the MAGA minions into an uproar and brought the Epstein story back to the fore.
Trump’s approval rating has slipped nearly 9 points since July 10 as the drama over the Epstein files has unraveled—it stands at just 0.8 points higher than the nadir during his first term. Trump’s disapproval rating, meanwhile, has climbed to 53 percent, per Silver.
A former Epstein associate in his own right—one of Epstein’s former girlfriends on Friday told CNN the pair were “best friends”—Trump has long courted far-right conspiracy theorists who believe the late financier’s crimes were part of an international child sex trafficking ring implicating Democrats. While campaigning for president, Trump promised full disclosure on the case, and Attorney General Pam Bondi told Fox News in February that the “Epstein list” not only exists but was then “sitting on my desk right now” awaiting review.
The Wall Street Journal has since doused the ensuing PR dumpster fire with a handsome dose of kerosene, reporting Friday that the president once sent Epstein a birthday card featuring a bizarre imagined exchange between the two men about “enigmas” and “a wonderful secret,” accompanied by a scribbled drawing of a nude woman.
While that may make it seem as though Johnson pulled that 90 percent rating out of thin air, a closer look at the poll reveals that close to 88 percent of Republicans still have a positive view of Trump’s overall performance on policy this far into his second term.
Whether that’s what he meant to say, thereby excluding non-GOP supporters entirely from his comments, the Daily Beast has reached out to clarify.
