White House

Trump approval rating is lowest for any modern president one year into his term, new NBC/WSJ poll says

Key Points
  • President Trump scored only a 39 percent approval rating in the new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.
  • It is the lowest approval rating in the survey's history for any modern president after his first year in office.
  • More than half of respondents say they strongly disapproved of Trump's performance.
Trump's approval rating is the lowest for any president one year into his term, NBC/WSJ poll says
VIDEO0:5100:51
Trump's approval rating is the lowest for any president one year into his term, NBC/WSJ poll says

President Donald Trump scored a 39 percent approval rating in the new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll — the lowest approval rating in the survey's history for any modern president one year into his term.

The poll was conducted Jan. 13 to 17, after the uproar began over Trump's vulgar description and dismissal of Haiti and African nations and while chances of a government shutdown grew as Congress scrambled to reach a funding deal. Saturday is the first anniversary of Trump's inauguration.

Fifty-one percent of respondents to the poll said they strongly disapproved of Trump's performance in the Oval Office, a record high for the president in the NBC/WSJ poll. Overall, 57 percent of people said they disapproved of the president's job.

In February, just after Trump took office, 44 percent of respondents in the poll said they approved of the president's performance, while 48 percent disapproved.

Trump's administration has been beset by turmoil since the beginning, marked by unusually high amounts of senior staff turnover and a criminal investigation into whether the Trump campaign colluded with the Kremlin during the 2016 election.

More recently, Trump has been plagued by explosive revelations and assertions made by former campaign chief and fired White House chief strategist Steve Bannon in from a co-founder of the firm behind an inflammatory dossier about Trump's purported connections to Russian businessmen and mobsters has also .

Trump, in search of a major early legislative win, pushed for repeal of President Barack Obama's Affordable Care Act, but the effort fizzled on multiple occasions in 2017 before the president and the Republican-controlled Congress moved on to a sweeping tax-cut bill. Trump signed the measure into law in December. Polls have shown that voters are dubious about the tax bill's benefits, which slashed corporate tax rates and eliminated several popular individual deductions, but Trump has insisted people will see more money in their paychecks.

For the time being, however, voters are skeptical of the president, according to the NBC/WSJ poll. His approval ratings from some of his major constituent groups — whites, men and seniors — are below 50 percent, the latest findings show. (The percentages among those groups are 46 percent, 45 percent and 41 percent, respectively.)

Trump's approval rating among voters ages 18-34 was 35 percent, 33 percent among women, 26 percent among Latinos, and 8 percent of African-Americans.

The pollsters also asked voters which words best described how they felt about Trump. Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who conducted the survey with Republican pollster Bill McInturff, told NBC News that voters used the word "hopeful" the most when Trump first took office.

This time, "disgusted" was the most popular word, at 38 percent, followed by "scared" at 24 percent and "hopeful" at 23 percent.

The NBC/WSJ poll was conducted of 900 adults, nearly half reached by cellphone, and has an overall margin of error of plus-minus 3.3 percentage points. The rest of the poll will be released later Friday.

—NBC News contributed to this report.

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