Rather than get the approval of the TV audience for announcing the pardon of Sheriff Joe Arpaio on Friday night while Hurricane Harvey started battering Houston, Democrats and GOP members instead criticized the pardon for Arpaio. The real estate billionaire remains a disliked president based on his approval rating which continued to plummet.
Time reported that on Monday, the Gallup weekly tracker showed the backlash to the Arpaio pardon and the aftermath of the hurricane as adult approval of Trump on his 200 days in office hit an all-time low of 35 percent.
For the same period during his term, Barack Obama, trump’s predecessor, enjoyed a 50 percent approval rating.
Higher ratings
Trump admitted in a joint press conference with Finnish President Sauli Niinisto that he deliberately made the pardon announcement as Harvey was about to start because there would be more audience. “In the middle of a hurricane, even though it was a Friday evening, I assumed the ratings would be far higher than they would be normally,” The New York Daily News reported.
Arpaio, convicted of criminal contempt, was pardoned by Trump whom the president described as a patriot who defended the country’s borders. The president insisted that the former sheriff was not treated fairly by the law when he faced reelection in Maricopa County in 2016.
To further justify his decision to pardon Arpaio, who discriminated against Latino citizens and made his detainees suffer humiliation and violence, Trump cited Obama’s pardon of Chelsea Manning, a military leaker. Manning, a transgender male, however, served years in confinement before he was pardoned by Obama, while Arpaio was pardoned before the sheriff spent a single day in jail.
On Sunday, Arpaio said he would do anything for Trump and would accept any position in the president’s administration if offered. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, however, said she is not aware of any offer of a position to the former sheriff.
Faltering approval rating
Time reported that the job approval rating of the president is updated every Monday.
It is based on the weekly average of the daily survey of Gallup which polls 1,500 adults through a telephone interview. Trump’s approval rating has been faltering in recent weeks. His three-day average was a low 34 percent between Aug. 11 and 13 when he was heavily criticized for his response to the Charlottesville violence.
