Most Americans don't think Trump will be cleared

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BY JOHN BOWDEN - 04/17/19 11:14 AM EDT

A majority of Americans don't believe that Robert Mueller's report on the results of the years-long special counsel investigation into Russia's election interference will exonerate President Trump, according to a new poll.

In a poll from the left-leaning group Navigator, first reported by Politico, just 30 percent of respondents said they accept Trump and his allies' assertion that the report fully clears Trump of wrongdoing following Attorney General William Barr's summary of Mueller's findings that stated the special counsel had found no evidence to link Trump's campaign to Russia, and did not take a position on whether he had obstructed justice.

Of those surveyed, 45 percent said that they think the report will be inconclusive, while 18 percent said they did not know enough to form an opinion.

Fifty-one percent of respondents, including 46 percent of independent voters, now say that they fear that the Trump administration “will get away with corruption, unethical behavior or mishandling important problems," according to the poll ...

https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/439292-poll-most-americans-dont-think-mueller-report-clears-trump

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1. 6 in 10 Americans believe Trump obstructed justice

Hope Yen and, The Associated Press Published 6:56 p.m. ET April 17, 2019

WASHINGTON — As the nation awaits the release of the special counsel’s report Thursday, a new poll finds that many Americans aren’t ready to clear President Donald Trump in the Russia investigation. Slightly more Americans want Congress to keep investigating than to set aside its probes after special counsel Robert Mueller left open the question of whether Trump broke the law.

About 6 in 10 continue to believe the president obstructed justice.

The poll by The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research also finds greater GOP confidence in the investigation after Attorney General William Barr in late March released his letter saying Mueller found no criminal conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russia but didn’t make a judgment on the obstruction question.

At the same time, the poll indicates that Americans are mostly unhappy with the amount of information that has been released so far. They’ll get more Thursday, when Barr is expected to release a redacted version of the nearly 400-page report ...

https://www.yorkdispatch.com/story/news/2019/04/17/poll-americans-believe-trump-obstructed-justice/39359305/

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2. Poll: Most Americans Still Think Trump Obstructed Justice

April 17, 2019 JON PARTON

... A majority of Americans agree with congressional Democrats who have pushed for a full copy of the report. Sixty percent say Congress should receive the full and unredacted report, according to a Monmouth University poll released Wednesday.

Michael Cook, a 40-year-old Democrat and video producer from Overland Park, Kansas, said he is still suspicious of Trump largely because Mueller’s report still hasn’t been released.

“I think he’s hiding something,” Cook said of Barr. “I want to see what evidence Mueller found, according to his own words.”

The same poll also shows 54% of respondents said Congress should stop looking into remaining concerns stemming from the Mueller investigation ...

https://www.courthousenews.com/poll-most-americans-still-think-trump-obstructed-justice/

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3. How Hispanics Really Feel About Trump

By THE CONVERSATION APR 17, 2019

By Stella Rouse, University of Maryland and Shibley Telhami, University of Maryland

For the first time in history, Hispanic voters are expected to be the largest minority group in the 2020 electorate, according to the Pew Research Center.

With his re-election on the line, it’s no surprise that President Donald Trump is publicly courting Hispanics. In fact, in late January, he touted a poll he claimed showed his support among Hispanics had risen from 19% to 50%, due to his immigration policies.

However, these rosy statistics are misleading, since the poll was not designed to gauge Hispanic voters’ opinions. It did not poll many Hispanics and did not ask questions in both English and Spanish ...

... most Hispanic voters don’t back Trump and his policies. In fact, Hispanics oppose his immigration policies in larger numbers than the rest of the population ...

https://latinousa.org/2019/04/17/hispanicstrump/

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4. Approval low in swing districts

... Poll results released on Wednesday by Monmouth University show that voters in swing districts — where the margin between Trump and his 2016 presidential election opponent Hillary Clinton was less than 10 percentage points — actually disapprove of Trump's performance in the Oval Office at higher rates than voters in districts who supported Clinton by more than 10 percentage points ...

https://theweek.com/speedreads/835731/trumps-approval-rating-abysmally-low-swing-districts-poll-finds

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5. Trump's numbers plummet with unemployment at less than 4%

WED, APR 17TH, 2019 BY JASON EASLEY

... The number of people who think that the economy is going in the right direction has dropped from 40% in June of 2018 to 28% in April 2019. The number who feel that the country is on the wrong track has grown from 53% in June of 2018 to 62% in April 2018. There has been a 21 point net swing against Trump and the direction of the country in less than a year.

A normal president would be able to point to the low unemployment rate, and cruise to a second term. Trump is not a normal president. The Monmouth University poll is another piece of data that suggests that the 2020 election will be about Trump, not the economy. Voters have problems with Trump’s tax cuts, immigration policy, healthcare policy, racism, and bigotry ...

https://www.politicususa.com/2019/04/17/trumps-poll-numbers-plummet-with-unemployment-at-less-than-4.html

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6. Too unpopular to get anything done

By Oliver Willis - April 17, 2019

... Trump "is the only president in the history of Gallup polling never to earn the support of a majority of Americans even for a single day of his term," the New York Times recently noted ...

Gallup's rating falls in line with other major opinion polling that shows Trump has never been able to secure an approval rating of 50 percent or higher ...

https://shareblue.com/gop-congressman-glenn-grothman-trump-too-unpopular-to-get-anything-done/

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7. The President of Trumpland

DOUG MATACONIS · WEDNESDAY, APRIL 17, 2019

... Trump has consistently and loudly used the Presidency to appeal largely and almost exclusively to the minority of voters who elected him President in 2016. This is one of the many reasons why his job approval numbers remain near historic lows for a first-term President even while his support among Republicans is at levels that even Presidents such as Reagan and George W, Bush did not reach except during relatively brief moments in their Presidencies. Given the fact that we are now more than two years into Trump’s Presidency, any expectation that he is going to change this strategy or that we should expect a “pivot” from this President now or at any point in the future. Donald Trump hasn’t changed fundamentally from who and what he was in the 1980s. Expecting him to change now is expecting the improbable.

The question, of course, is whether this is a viable strategy for winning re-election in 2020, because the evidence suggests that it isn’t. Trump managed to win in 2016 notwithstanding the fact that he lost the popular vote, something that has only happened four other times in American history and only twice since the beginning of the 20th Century, because he won narrow election victories in states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. The main reason that happened is because his opponent’s campaign ignored warnings that these states were slipping away from Democrats as early as the first week of October 2016 and because he happened to be running against a Democrat who had personal favorable numbers that were as bad as his were. That’s unlikely to be the case in 2020. Whoever the Democrats nominate, they are unlikely to take the Upper Midwest for granted like they did in 2016 and their nominee is unlikely to come with the two decades worth of political baggage ...

https://www.outsidethebeltway.com/donald-trump-is-the-president-of-trumpland-not-the-united-states/

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8. Tax Day is over -- and Trump's tax bill is even less popular

By Michelle Singletary
Columnist
April 17 at 3:58 PM

Tax Day is now over, and many Americans say they didn't notice the "tremendous" tax break President Trump promised.

"This is going to be one of the great gifts to the middle-income people of this country that they've ever gotten for Christmas," Trump said in December 2017, just before the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was passed.

But Trump's habit of hyperbole hasn't worked well in selling the tax cuts to the American people.

A new poll -- released by Gallup just before the April 15 tax deadline -- shows that more people disapprove than approve of the GOP-backed bill, which ushered in such major changes to the tax code as a doubling of the standard deduction. It also took away a lot of fan-favorite deductions, such as personal exemptions ...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/04/17/tax-day-is-over-trumps-tax-bill-is-even-less-popular-after-people-see-their-returns/?utm_term=.d84454cf8959

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9. Daily job approval for April 15, 2019

https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2019/04/17/president-trump-daily-job-approval-april-15-2019

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10. Today will be the proof...

Today we will know if the Russian coup is complete or not.