Poll: Trump’s credibility gap plunges to level of Nixon, LBJ

May shake dealings with foreign chiefs, Congress, public

USA TODAY

President Donald Trump drew the biggest inaugural crowd in history — except he didn’t. President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower during the campaign — except there’s no evidence he did. Trump fired FBI Director James Comey because the deputy attorney general concluded he had mishandled the Hillary Clinton email investigation — except now the president says it was his decision alone and cites the Russia investigation as the reason.

On issues big and small, substantive and cosmetic, the Trump White House has failed to give accurate accounts of what happened until photographs, records, reporting and, in some cases, the president’s own words provide a new version of the facts. Even when confronted with evidence, the president and his spokespeople don’t always acknowledge the need to correct a falsehood.

Trump now faces the biggest credibility gap of any president since at least Richard Nixon during Watergate (a scandal that forced his resignation) or Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam War (a controversy that prompted him not to seek a second full term). For LBJ, it was the disparity between the official version of the war and the reporting from the front lines that added the phrase “credibility gap” to the political lexicon.

“I wrote a book about what goes into making great presidential leadership, and one of the elements I said was credibility, was trust,” said presidential historian Robert Dallek, author of “Hail to the Chief: The Making and Unmaking of American Presidents” as well as biographies of Franklin Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Nixon and Johnson. “When presidents lose the trust of the public, I think it’s very difficult if not impossible for them to govern this country.”

The current controversies have taken a toll on Americans’ views of Trump. In a Quinnipiac University Poll this month, those surveyed said, 61 percent to 33percent, that Trump wasn’t honest. That puts him 28 percentage points underwater on honesty, double the 14-point divide he scored in the same survey at the beginning of the year.

The poll was taken before the latest and most spectacular example: the decision to fire Comey. At the White House on Tuesday night, press secretary Sean Spicer said the decision had been made by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who had criticized Comey’s handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails; Trump had accepted Rosenstein’s recommendation. Vice President Mike Pence repeated that explanation to reporters on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.

But on Thursday, Trump told NBC’s Lester Holt he had decided to fire Comey regardless of what Rosenstein recommended, and he cited a different reason: “When I decided to just do it, I said to myself, I said, you know, this Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story. It’s an excuse by the Democrats for having lost an election that they should have won.”

Trump’s decision to dismiss the FBI director has rattled Washington, stoked what Democrats already call the “Resistance.” and fueled reporting that the president is about to shake up his senior White House staff. Questions about whether Trump will stand by his word imperil efforts to negotiate a health care compromise and a major tax package with members of Congress. And it casts a cloud over his first international trip, which begins this week.

“President Trump has sacrificed his credibility (with) his outrageous disregard for the truth and his penchant for outrage,” said Ron Klain, a senior White House aide in the Clinton and Obama administrations. “It will be sorely missed when a crisis comes.”

Klain called Trump “a polarizing president with a dubious relationship to facts” who has created “an environment where his supporters believe him even when he is lying, and more and more Americans won’t believe him even if he is telling the truth.”

Credibility has damaged officials beyond Trump. Based on assurances from then-National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, Pence assured Americans that Flynn hadn’t discussed U.S. sanctions in a conversation with Russian officials before the inauguration; when that turned out to be untrue, Flynn was fired.

House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes, R-Calif., was forced to step down from leading the panel’s investigation into Russian meddling in the U.S. election after he became enmeshed in White House attempts to justify Trump’s accusation of illegal wiretapping by Obama during the campaign.

Then there’s Spicer, regularly dispatched to defend Trump’s most provocative assertions, who was the target of another brutal parody over the weekend on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live.”

“Trump is innocent,” the Spicer figure, portrayed by Melissa McCarthy, told a White House briefing. “How do we know? Because he told us so. Period.”