Washington (AFP) – President-elect Donald Trump will take office this week with an approval rating of 40 percent, sharply lower than any incoming US president in recent history, a new poll showed Tuesday.
The CNN/ORC poll showed Trump lagging more than 20 points behind the ratings of his three most recent predecessors and 44 points below that of President Barack Obama as he prepared to enter the Oval Office in 2009, CNN said.
Trump immediately slammed the poll findings.
“The same people who did the phony election polls, and were so wrong, are now doing approval rating polls. They are rigged just like before,” he said on Twitter.
Forty percent of poll respondents said they approved of the way Trump has been handling the transition period heading into Friday’s inauguration, the poll said.
In comparison, Obama had an 84 percent approval rating ahead of his inauguration, Bill Clinton scored 67 percent approval in late December 1992 and 61 percent approved of George W. Bush’s transition in poll figures from January 2001, CNN said.
Trump, a New York real estate developer working in government for the first time, has presided over a chaotic transition period since his election on November 8.
The recent weeks have featured a drawn-out search for top cabinet members, public feuds with the media, unsubstantiated allegations that Russia holds compromising material against Trump, and the president-elect’s Twitter blasts against critics ranging from the CIA chief to late-night comedy show “Saturday Night Live.”
The CNN/ORC poll has a margin of error of plus or minus three percentage points.
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