Trump's poll numbers hit record low
WASHINGTON • One of Donald Trump’s personal lawyers has struck back at allegations the president’s son was guilty of wrongdoing by meeting Russian lobbyists last year, claiming the Secret Service would not have allowed any such meeting if it broke any rules.
Jay Sekulow, who ran a White House media blitz on TV talk shows Sunday, insisted there was nothing suspicious about Donald Trump Jr.’s meeting with a Russian lawyer and a lobbyist at Trump Tower.
“Well, I wonder why the Secret Service, if this was nefarious, why the Secret Service allowed these people in. The president had Secret Service protection at that point and that raised a question with me,” he told ABC News.
The spiralling Russia controversy helped push Trump’s approval ratings to a historic low over the weekend.
An ABC News/Washington Post poll released Sunday found that only 36 per cent of Americans approved of his record after six months in office — the lowest figure for a president at this stage since records began 70 years ago.
The numbers represent a decline from 42 per cent support in April. His disapproval rating has risen five points to 58 per cent. Overall, 48 per cent say they “disapprove strongly” of Trump’s performance in office, a level never reached by former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama and reached only in the second term of George W. Bush in ABC/Post polling.
Almost half of all Americans (48 per cent) see the country’s leadership in the world as weaker since Trump was inaugurated, compared with 27 per cent who say it is stronger. Despite the fact that Trump campaigned as someone skilled at making deals that would be good for the country, majorities also say they do not trust him in negotiations with foreign leaders and in particular Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The poll was conducted July 10-13 among a random national sample of 1,001 adults reached on cellular and landline phones. The margin of sampling error for overall results is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
Trump took to Twitter to dismiss the poll as “just about the most inaccurate” survey and defended his son.
“Hillary Clinton can illegally get the questions to the Debate & delete 33,000 emails but my son Don is being scorned by the Fake News Media,” he wrote.
The counter-attacks followed a week of revelations about his son’s meeting with a Russian lawyer in June last year.
The emerging details suggest Trump Jr. agreed to meet Natalia Veselnitskaya after being told she had damaging information about Clinton as part of a Kremlin campaign to support his father in the election.
Later in the week Rinat Akhmetshin, a RussianAmerican lobbyist who once served in a counter-intelligence unit of the Soviet army, confirmed he was present at the meeting.
The result is a fresh slew of questions about whether Trump’s campaign was colluding with Russian efforts to swing the election his way.
All of this comes at a moment when Canadians are about to learn what the Trump administration wants to do with NAFTA. After campaigning and complaining about the trade deal with Canada and Mexico for two years, the president is poised to release a list as early as Monday revealing how he wants to change the deal.
American law requires that the administration publish a list of its objectives entering trade negotiations. The reason this could happen any day is because the administration hopes to start negotiations around Aug. 16 and the law requires this list be posted online 30 days in advance.
The U.S. has signalled wildly conflicting approaches.
Trump keeps threatening to rip up the trade agreement in the absence of a major renegotiation. His vicepresident, Mike Pence, just delivered a speech exuding collegiality and promising a new NAFTA that would be a “win-win-win.”
The signals to Congress have been equally contradictory.
In a leaked draft of a letter to lawmakers, the administration showed a desire to play hardball and seek changes that would be deemed non-starters by the other countries. It later released a bare-bones, modest version of that letter.
Those mixed messages are due in part to philosophical differences within Trump’s team about how aggressive to get on trade.