Donald J. Trump’s “career average approval rating is the lowest for any president in modern polling, back to 1939, and he is the first president in that time never to achieve majority approval at any point,” finds a poll commissioned by ABC News:
Nine in 10 Americans oppose the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, seven in 10 say Donald Trump bears at least some responsibility for it and a majority in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll – 56% – favors efforts in Congress to bar him from holding elected office again.
Fifty-four percent in the national survey also say Trump should be charged criminally with inciting a riot for having encouraged his supporters to march on the Capitol. More, 66%, say he has behaved irresponsibly, more broadly, in his statements and actions since the election.
Trump had help, of course, not that he needed help being utterly out of his depth. He appointed family members to White House posts who were way out of theirs. Trump’s chiefs of staff also were far less than stellar.
Rep. Mark Meadows takes the prize for the worst of them, Chris Whipple writes in the Washington Post:
In a secure tent on the Ellipse last week, as President Trump prepared to incite an angry mob ahead of its assault on the U.S. Capitol, White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, smiling from ear to ear, mugged for a video with Donald Trump Jr., as Laura Branigan’s 1982 hit “Gloria” blared in the background.
For Trump’s glad-handing chief of staff, it was just another day of dutifully holding the president’s coat while the boss took a hammer to democracy. This will be the defining image of Meadows, for which he has earned the title of worst chief of staff in history.
Meadows “has raised sycophancy to an art form,” Whipple adds. Had Trump won reelection, Meadows might have found that title challenged by his NC-11 replacement, Republican Madison Cawthorn. And by Sen. Lindsey Graham, and by Rep. Matt Gaetz and others among the Republican House caucus. The competition is fierce.