Will Donald Trump Be Impeached? President’s Approval Rating Drops Among Independents

While President Donald Trump was making his way through a multitude of international destinations, his approval rating back home remained low. Trump’s approval rating stood at 39 percent Thursday, according to a new Gallup poll.

In the time since he took office, Trump’s approval rating has dropped the most among independents, sinking 11 points from January to stand at 31 percent. Eighty-four percent of Republicans currently said they approved of the job he was doing, compared to 89 percent who said they approved during the week following his inauguration. Democrats, on the other hand, largely disapproved of Trump’s performance, with an approval rating down 7 percent from January.

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The current 39 percent approval rating shown in the Gallup poll was roughly similar to that of recent weeks but below his all-time low of 35 percent.

Trump and his administration have been the subject of numerous controversies since taking office in January. Most recently, the firing of FBI director James Comey prompted significant backlash from the president’s critics. And while polls showed that Comey actually had a lower job approval rating that Trump, those same polls revealed that many were more unhappy with the way Comey was fired than the actual firing itself.

“While I had deep reservations about the way Director Comey handled the investigation into the Clinton emails which I made clear at the time and since, to take this action without addressing the profound conflict of interest of the president and attorney general harkens back to a similarly tainted decision by President Nixon,” said Rep. Adam Schiff.

Numerous Democratic officials have stepped up to call for Trump’s impeachment amid the pervasive controversies and dwindling approval ratings.

“The President’s sudden and brazen firing of the FBI director raises the ghosts of some of the worst Executive Branch abuses,” said House minority leader Nancy Pelosi. “We cannot stand by and watch a cover-up of the possible collusion with a hostile foreign power to undermine American democracy.”

According to a Harvard-Harris survey released earlier in May, 66 percent of Democrats believed the president would be ousted before his term was over. Among independents and Republicans, however, 60 percent said they believed impeachment would go nowhere.

“There is no way to spin or sugarcoat these sagging numbers,” Tim Malloy, assistant director of Quinnipiac University polling, told The Hill earlier in May. “[These] are red flags that the administration simply can’t brush away.”

The White House, however, has notoriously put little stock into polling and approval ratings, often citing polls that showed Hillary Clinton would clinch the 2016 election.

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The president has seen approval ratings lower than any recorded by Gallup since they started their surveys in 1953, the company said. Allan Lichtman, the professor who correctly predicted Trump’s presidency before most others, said recently that Trump would be impeached before his term was over.

“Justice will be realized in today’s America not through revolution, but by the Constitution’s peaceful remedy of impeachment,” he wrote in his book “The Case for Impeachment.” “But only if the people demand it.”