In a new USA TODAY/ Suffolk University survey, a full 50 percent of respondents said that they believe that history will regard outgoing President Donald Trump as a “failed” president. A mere 16 percent of respondents said that they believe that history will see Trump as a “great president,” while 13 percent of respondents shared that they think that history will regard Trump as a “good” commander-in-chief. In other words, Trump’s base of the most fervent support seems strikingly small compared to the opinions of the country as a whole, with merely 29 percent of respondents predicting a “great” or “good” perspective of Trump in historical hindsight.
In the survey, 16 percent of respondents predicted that history would judge Trump as a “fair president,” which doesn’t exactly sound like a ringing endorsement, and the remaining 5 percent of respondents said that they were undecided. Notably, the portion of Americans characterizing Trump as an apparent failure is over twice as high as the portion of Americans who offered the same assessment of then-outgoing President Barack Obama in a USA Today/ Suffolk University poll in 2016. At the time, only 23 percent of respondents predicted that history would regard Obama as a “failed” president. Meanwhile, 18 percent of respondents characterized Obama as a “great” president, and 32 percent of respondents called him a “good” chief executive.
Troublingly, although the new USA Today/ Suffolk University survey reveals widespread national disdain for Trump, the survey reveals close attachment to his nonsense within the Republican Party. A full 57 percent of Republican respondents said that Trump shouldn’t concede the election (although whether or not he does so technically doesn’t have any meaningful legal weight), and 78 percent of Republican respondents indicated that they believe that Biden “didn’t legitimately win the office” of president, USA Today explains. There is no legitimate evidence supporting this notion, and judges around the country — including a slew of the president’s own appointees — have unequivocally rejected claims about supposed problems from the president and his allies. Trump, however, has fostered a culture of steep ignorance.
Interestingly, despite their rejection of the legitimacy of Biden’s electoral victory, a full 62 percent of Republicans said that Trump should attend Biden’s inauguration in January. Maybe some Republicans aren’t as committed to Trump’s lies about the election as their public bluster would suggest. Overall, 66 percent of respondents said that Trump should attend Biden’s inauguration, although whether or not Trump will actually do so is definitely an open question.
