Trump’s polls:

A new, historic low

President Trump “is historically unpopular,” said Harry Enten in FiveThirtyEight.com. Six months into his first term, a new Washington Post/ABC News poll found, only 36 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s performance, while 58 percent disapprove. In aggregates of all surveys, he fares far worse at this point (39 percent) than any president “since modern polling began” 70 years ago— his predecessors averaged 62 percent. The details of the Post/ABC poll offer the president little comfort: 48 percent of Americans “disapprove strongly” of his performance, and 70 percent say he’s behaved in an “unpresidential” manner. “The first six months of Trump’s presidency were brutal; the next six months could well be worse,” said Susan Page in USA Today. In addition to a continuing stream of disclosures about the Russia scandal, Trump must contend with his inability to replace Obamacare with a “wonderful” new health-care system, build a wall at the Mexican border, or fulfill his other campaign pledges.

Still, “Trump’s political base is sticking with him,” said Michael Bender in The Wall Street Journal. A new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll shows that in counties the president won in 2016, 50 percent of adults approve of his job performance. The avalanche of poor press “has had no effect whatsoever” on Trump’s core supporters, said Becket Adams in WashingtonExaminer.com. In a new Bloomberg poll, “a whopping 89 percent of respondents who say they voted for Trump also say he’s doing a fine job as commander in chief.” The mainstream media may be obsessed with Trump’s tweets, Kellyanne Conway’s latest gaffe, or whether the campaign colluded with Russia, but die-hard Trumpists simply don’t care. Clearly, “a significant portion of the electorate has tuned out the press entirely.”

“That is the Trump bubble,” said Philip Bump in The Washington Post. Inside this bubble are the 25 percent of the electorate who insulate themselves in pro-Trump media and “strongly approve” of the president’s job performance across the board: A quarter “think America’s position in the world has gotten stronger”; a quarter think he’s presidential and that it’s perfectly fine that his son and associates met with Russians to get dirt on Hillary Clinton. Right now, congressional Republicans are reluctant to criticize Trump, “because his bubble overlaps with their primaryelection voters.” It’s a relatively small pool, but Trump “is swimming in it gleefully.”