It wasn't the best week for Donald Trump on the home front and the numbers on CNN made that crystal clear.
On Thursday evening, anchor John Berman brought in the network's chief data analyst Harry Enten to break down where the president currently stands with American voters on healthcare. What followed was a straightforward but damaging look at the polling landscape.
Enten pulled up a comparative graphic showing disapproval ratings for every president since the turn of the century on the issue of healthcare. Trump's number stood out immediately highlighted in red, sitting at 65% disapproval. No other president in the dataset came close.
"That is the highest for any president this century," Enten said plainly.
For context, Barack Obama hit a peak disapproval of 63% on healthcare and that was during the deeply polarizing Obamacare debate, when the country was sharply divided over the Affordable Care Act. George W. Bush reached the same 63% mark during discussions around privatizing Social Security. Joe Biden's healthcare disapproval topped out at 57%.
Trump, according to the data, has managed to surpass all of them.
"Trump's actually beating Obama at this score," Enten noted, "and that's a score you don't want to be beating."
Meanwhile, Thousands of Miles Away in Beijing...
While the domestic headlines weren't kind, Trump was wrapping up the first full day of his Chinese state visit a trip carrying enormous geopolitical weight.
He arrived at Beijing's Great Hall of the People to a formal and visually grand reception. Trump and President Xi Jinping shook hands on the red carpet before heading into what would become a lengthier-than-expected bilateral meeting. The talks ran for roughly two hours, surpassing the originally scheduled time.
Trump, never one to undersell his own diplomacy, called the conversation "great." But beyond that, the White House offered few specifics on what was actually resolved or even seriously discussed.
The Taiwan Warning No One Can Ignore
One detail that did emerge from the meeting, however, was significant. Xi Jinping reportedly used the sit-down to issue a direct warning about Taiwan, telling Trump that if Washington continues escalating its support for the self-governed island, the two countries risk sliding into outright conflict.
Xi's message was blunt: the US and China could "come into conflict" over Taiwan. It's the kind of language that doesn't get softened in diplomatic translations.
Taiwan has long been a flashpoint between Washington and Beijing, with China insisting the island is part of its territory and the US maintaining a complicated policy of strategic ambiguity selling weapons to Taipei while officially acknowledging Beijing's position.
Trade and Tech on the Table
Beyond Taiwan, the central business of the visit was always going to be the trade relationship a bruising, ongoing tension between the world's two largest economies.
Trump said he intended to press Xi on opening China's market to major American technology companies, a long-standing sticking point that US tech firms have struggled with for years. He also signaled that Iran would come up in conversation, framing it as a "long talk" while simultaneously insisting the US didn't need China's assistance to resolve the conflict.
Whether any of that translates into concrete progress remains to be seen. For now, the two leaders have talked. The details, as is often the case with US-China diplomacy, are still emerging.
Back home, the polling clock keeps ticking and 65% is a number Trump's team will want to move in a very different direction before the next news cycle catches up with it.
Comments
Post a Comment