Issue #958 The Choice, Thursday, November 13, 2025
When President Richard Nixon was forced to leave office in disgrace in August of 1974 after the whole Watergate scandal came to light and the hearings that followed, Nixon’s approval rating had sunk to a dismal 24% from a high of 67% in November of 1969. Until Trump, Nixon held the dubious distinction of being widely acknowledged as the most corrupt president of modern times, and certainly of the 20th century. At the time, in America’s collective naivete, most of us didn’t believe we would ever live to see another president as corrupt as Nixon.
Yeah well. Now we know better.
Or do we?
The Watergate scandal was bad. Very bad. And Nixon was most certainly corrupt. Very corrupt. But I think it’s safe to say that Trump has far, far surpassed Nixon as the most corrupt president in modern times. Because not only is he corrupt, but he is also woefully incompetent and visibly suffering from dementia. And he is trying to destroy American democracy and set himself up as dictator for life. Just recently, he barely batted an eye as millions of Americans were facing possible starvation because he refused to allow SNAP funds to be distributed (which is illegal) until he got what he wanted from the government shutdown, which he allowed to stretch into the longest government shutdown in history.
And yet…
Trump’s most recent approval rating, according to Gallup, is 41%. Down roughly 6% from his highest rating of 49% during his first term. His highest rating during his second term was 47% right after he got elected. Other polls show his approval rating slightly lower, around 39%.
But how is it that after all of this, Trump, at his lowest point, is still polling close to 15% higher than Nixon was during his lowest point? At most, the gap between Trump’s best days and his worst is between 6-10%. For Nixon? It was more than 40%.
I’m a big fan of Rachel Maddow, but when I hear her and others repeatedly emphasize how bad Trump’s polling numbers are and how they are tanking, I have to wonder why they aren’t emphasizing how high his polling numbers are, considering the clear and present danger he poses to the country, far worse than anything this country has ever seen before. Is it the accuracy of polling that has changed that much? Or is it us? And keep in mind that, numerically, Trump has managed to increase the number of folks voting for him each time he ran for the presidency. And even when he lost to President Biden in 2020, and so much was made of the record voter turnout for Biden, Trump still managed to surpass the previous turnout record, even though he finished in second place. Just not by as wide a margin as Biden’s.
In a sane nation, Trump could never have gotten elected a second time. Ever. But now that he is in office and has done everything we warned he would, his polling numbers should barely crack the single digits.
But yet here we are. Either the polling is wrong, or we still have an awful lot of work to do.
“Is it the accuracy of polling that has changed that much? Or is it us?”
It’s us, and the information we get and how we get it.