President Trump's Approval Rating Falls To 37 Percent: Gallup

President Trump's approval rating has dropped to 37 percent, its lowest point yet, according to Gallup's daily tracking poll. In the same survey, 58 percent of people said they disapprove of the the president's performance.

This is a deep hole to for a president to be in so early in his first term.

Public perception of every president varies over time, of course. But Ronald Reagan went two years in office before his approval rating dipped below 40 percent. George H.W. Bush was in office for three years before it happened to him, and his son, George W. Bush, benefited from approval ratings of more than 40 percent until his second term (though he was buoyed by a huge positive spike following Sept. 11, 2001).

Trump's immediate predecessor, Barack Obama, didn't have an approval rating below 40 percent until well into 2011. Obama had a sky-high approval rating when he came into office, which Trump didn't receive.

Nate Cohn, of the New York Times' Upshot, notes that this new low for Trump's numbers could just be statistical noise, meaning that the drop itself is not necessarily significant:

On the other hand, the Trump administration is not sailing smoothly so far. A first draft of an immigration ban faced widespread outrage and a quick judicial rebuke, and his second draft was just recently stalled by the courts. Republicans introduced a health care plan, which Trump quickly threw his weight behind, and the bill has been widely criticized by all sides of the political divide.

Trump has also accused Obama of wiretapping Trump Tower, an unsubstantiated claim drawing much skepticism and derision. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced he would recuse himself after it was revealed that, contrary to his testimony before the Senate, he met at least twice with the Russian ambassador during the campaign.

With all that going on in just the last few weeks, Gallup's falling approval rating may indeed reflect real sentiments.

And either way, the fact that Trump's numbers are so low to begin with, when most presidents get a "honeymoon" in their first terms, does not bode well.

It's also worth noting that FiveThirtyEight, which aggregates approval ratings across multiple polling firms, finds a recent decline in its data as well. Gallup's polls tend to lean more negative for Trump compared to other polls, but direction of the trend appears to be relatively robust.

Rasmussen Reports, which the president himself has publicly cited, shows a drop similar to Gallup's in Trump's approval rating. As one of the most Trump-friendly polling firms out there, it put his peak approval at 59 percent; now it's in the mid-to-high 40s.

None of this is to say Trump is doomed in the eyes of the public. Bill Clinton suffered an early sub-40 percent approval rating early in his first year in office, but he didn't stay there long. He slowly worked his way up in the public's view over the next eight years; even in the midst of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, his approval rating managed to stay in high 50s and low 60s until the end of his presidency.

But if these new low numbers for Trump show a real drop and not just an anomaly, he should be aware that there are many dangers for an unpopular president. Even people he thinks of as allies may decide to turn against him if they believe the American people oppose the president. And that could make his job even harder to do and public approval even more difficult to win back.

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