Protesters at a Trump rally in Atlanta, GA.
You might have noticed that President Donald Trump’s poll numbers have nudged up lately. It’s because Trump has realized that the public seems to like a spirit of bipartisanship in tackling tough problems. Whether it’s compromising on the debt ceiling to fund the most expensive hurricane to hit America, or resolving the status of Dreamers on immigration, Trump has found that people like “the art of the deal” when it resolves political gridlock.
President Trump began his presidency dead even, when it came to approval ratings and disapproval ratings, at 44 percent for each. That’s to be expected, after a contentious election. But while the president’s approval ratings plummeted to as low as 32 percent in August, his disapproval ratings shot up to 58 percent. What happened?
NBC’s poll the partial Muslim ban showed it was unpopular. Surveys did not show American popular support for repealing Obamacare, and managed to actually make the health care law more popular than ever, as Republicans couldn’t decide between repeal and replace, “skinny repeal” or terminating it and saying good luck to those once covered by it. That’s why I called for bipartisanship in an earlier column on the subject.
Fewer people now want a border wall and few experts feel it would really solve the immigration issue. In-party fighting between Trump, House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell over who was to blame tore apart Republicans. The response to Charlottesville only made things worse, helping the president set records for low public support.
So Donald Trump went back to one factor that attracted so many to his presidency: “The Art of the Deal.” After a tepid response to Hurricane Harvey, he reached out to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, cutting an agreement on the debt ceiling to avoid leaving so many Texans in financial distress after the 500 year storm struck. Such good will from the deal could be felt in Florida and Georgia after Hurricane Irma.
While Freedom Caucus in Congress started launching attacks on Trump for the debt deal, I emailed some Trump supporters as to what they thought of it all. They replied by saying they would trust the president, a far cry from what the ideologues in Washington, DC said.
Now it looks like Trump and Democrats are inching closer to a deal on DACA, the program allowing “Dreamers” to stay in the United States, in exchange for “enhanced border security” which might do a better job of actually limiting immigration than some silly wall in the middle of nowhere. Businesses support keeping the DACA program around too.
Trump may have also been motivated by polls showing a strong majority want Dreamers to stay in America and become U.S. citizens. Or he might have seen surveys from 2015 and 2017 reveal that Dreamers (a) are more likely to start a business than even white residents, (b) are taking advantage of educational opportunities, (c) are working hard for Fortune 500 companies, (d) buying cars and (e) are therefore paying taxes, hardly the huddle masses critics are making them out to be. They’re a lot more like Republicans! Why deport the future of the GOP?
Steve Bannon argued that the only reason churches defended DACA was to get more Christians in the pews. And that’s a bad thing? Bannon’s firing, and current lack of control over several unpopular policies, might also explain Trump’s rise in the polls.
Hard core conservatives have responded by burning Trump hats. I’m sure the president had a good laugh, knowing he could now sell more. Reports claim these deals with Dems are also improving Trump’s spirits, which once sagged when it turns out Breitbart News didn’t really have any idea where American views really were. But now that the moderates are in charge, the president has a chance to rehabilitate his image with the American people.
John A. Tures is a professor of political science at LaGrange College in LaGrange, Ga. He can be reached at jtures@lagrange.edu. His Twitter account is JohnTures2.
