56 percent

Poll: 56 percent say Trump 'tearing the country apart'

By CRISTIANO LIMA

Fifty-six percent of voters say they believe President Donald Trump is “tearing the country apart” instead of drawing people together, according to a new Fox News poll released Wednesday.

While the findings are sharply divided along partisan lines — with 15 percent of Republicans describing Trump as “tearing the country apart” but a whopping 93 percent of Democrats saying he is — only 33 percent of voters overall said they believe the president is “drawing the country together.”

The findings underscore a string of increasingly negative perceptions of the Trump White House, which continues to register low ratings on a wide array of issues, including its handling of North Korea, Russia, the environment, health care and race relations, with a majority of voters registering disapproval of each. A majority of voters did not approve of Trump’s handling of any of the major policy areas covered in the poll.

The president’s general approval rating, which has yet to clear the 50 percent threshold in Fox News surveys since he entered office, remained at 41 percent, the same score he received last month, and is 7 percentage points down from the poll’s first post-inaugural findings in February. Trump’s disapproval rating, meanwhile, reached a high of 55 percent this month.

Despite the findings, more than 90 percent of voters still support the ballot they cast in the November 2016 presidential election.

The president’s handling of recent national events drew more mixed results, with a plurality of 44 percent approving of his handling of the Hurricane Harvey relief efforts and a majority of 56 percent disapproving of his response to the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, this month. While Trump’s response to the natural disaster in Texas has been praised by local officials, including Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, his equivocations when addressing a white supremacist rally in Virginia drew the scorn of political and business leaders across the political spectrum.

According to U.S. voters, fault for the violent clashes in Charlottesville was largely that of the white supremacists in attendance: 52 percent of those surveyed blamed their actions and only 17 percent blamed counterprotesters.

White supremacists, however, only narrowly edged out the news media in the eyes of U.S. voters on who “poses a greater threat to the United States,” by a 47 to 40 percent margin. Seventy-percent of voters agreed, though, that Trump “dislikes” the news media more than he does white supremacists, highlighting the increasingly combative relationship between the president and the press.

Congress continued to register abysmal ratings in the Fox News survey, with only 15 percent approving and an overwhelming majority of 74 percent disapproving of the job they are doing. That ranking was only a slight dip from its prior rating of 17 percent approval in January.

The findings also registered the worst margin for the way people feel about how “things are going in the country today” since October 2013, with only 35 percent saying they are “satisfied” with the state of current affairs, compared with 64 percent who said they are “not satisfied.”

Among the most positive results in the latest Fox poll were those on the economic front: 36 percent said the economy is either in “excellent” or “good” shape, the highest ratings for the survey since August 2004

The Fox News poll randomly sampled 1,006 registered voters via landline and cellphone from Aug. 27 to 29, and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.