Donald Trump ranked ‘terrible president’ by 41% of Americans: Pew

Former President Trump left a mixed legacy upon leaving office that a slim majority of Americans recently described in negative terms, the Pew Research Center nonpartisan think tank reported Monday.

Pew released the results of a survey it conducted this month of 12,055 adults in which respondents were asked to describe Mr. Trump as having been a great, good, average, poor or terrible president.

Slightly more than half of the people surveyed — 53% — rated Mr. Trump as below average, including 12% who said he did a poor job as president and 41% who said his four years in office were terrible.

Comparatively, about one-third of respondents — 35% — said that Mr. Trump was a better than average president. Of those, 17% said that Mr. Trump was a great president while 18% said he was just good.

Twelve percent of respondents, or roughly one in 10 of the more than 12,000 adults surveyed, said that Mr. Trump did an average job as president, meanwhile, Pew reported.

Pew said the survey was done the first week of March, a little over a month after Mr. Trump, a Republican, was succeeded by President Biden, a Democrat, upon losing his race for reelection.

Not surprisingly, the results of the survey also show that Republicans and Democrats have vastly different opinions about Mr. Trump’s performance as president when respondents are grouped by party.

Among respondents who identify as Democrats or Democratic-learning, nearly three-quarters — 72% — told Pew that Mr. Trump was a terrible president, while only 4% said that he was either good or great.

Republicans, conversely, mostly gave Mr. Trump good reviews. Thirty-seven percent said he was a great president, 36% said he was a good president and 10% said that he was a poor or terrible president.

A message seeking Mr. Trump’s reaction to the survey was not immediately answered. He left office in January with a disapproval rating of 57.9%, according to the FiveThirtyEight data analysis site.

Pew said its survey was conducted through its online American Trends Panel, “a nationally representative panel of randomly selected U.S. adults,” and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 1.5 percentage points when taking into consideration the 12,000-respondents. The margin of sampling error is slightly larger when subsets of only Democrats or Republicans are considered.