Based on the daily countdown before President-elect Donald J. Trump assumes the role as the 45th President of the United States, there are now only 20 days to go before he officially succeeds President Barack Obama in office on January 20, the date of Trump’s inauguration.
Trump was elected President of the United States on November 8 after a hotly-contested election against Democrats candidate, former First Lady and Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, reports Trump 2016 Revolution.
While the election of Donald Trump and the election per se has created a great divide among Americans, when the dust and the smoke settled a few weeks later, it was clear that they all wanted the same thing – to make America great again, consistent with Trump’s battle cry.
Despite multiple media eruptions, a majority of Americans expect Donald Trump to succeed as president and even larger majorities have some or a lot of confidence in his ability to deal with the critical issues, details CNN.
Trump’s numbers actually run comparably close to those of his predecessors and top them all when it comes to the economy.
In fact, just two weeks after the US presidential elections, most Americans are already hopeful and confident that President-elect Donald Trump will ultimately do a good job as President.
Some actually based it on how he managed his businesses to become the billionaire that he is now and some attributed it to the reality that Trump gets things done when he puts his heart on it.
More optimists than pessimists
Based on the survey made by CNN, about 40% of the Americans are optimistic that Trump will do a good job while the narrow majority of 35% say that the incoming President will do a fairly good job as president. The remaining 25% of the population does not necessarily mean they are pessimists but only a portion of such, and perhaps less than 10%.
Americans believe that Trump will deal with the US economy very well, which actually outpaces the percentage of the confidence level that Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, or Ronald Reagan had days before they were inaugurated as US Presidents.
But Trump scored lowest in confidence on foreign affairs, with just 27% having a lot of confidence and 50% overall having at least some.
That still qualifies as second-best over the last 40 years of incoming presidents; Obama only scored 33%, and Bill Clinton came in last with 14%. Otherwise, Trump more or less scores in the middle of the lot of confidence in appointing the best people to office and providing real leadership for the country.
However, there is one significant difference between Trump’s numbers and those of his four predecessors, the number of those in the middle.
In all four categories, Trump gets between 22% to 25% for some confidence, while his no real confidence scores are much higher than those of his predecessors. About 34 percent have no confidence in his economic leadership, and on the other three issues, no confidence ranges from 43% to 49%.
Previous incoming presidents seem to have had a much larger benefit of the doubt granted to them by American voters, perhaps especially so for Obama. That could be a function of electing an outsider for the first time in a century or more, or it might be a particular evaluation of Trump himself and an artifact of a bruising campaign.
Capable of changing the country
The survey also noted a division in the responses to whether Donald Trump can change the country, where he scored 66/21, which is not all that far off from Obama’s 76/23 eight years ago.
However, 68% thought Obama would change the country for the better while only eight percent thought it would be for the worse.
For Trump, the split is still positive but less overwhelmingly so at 43/21. Respondents split nearly equally on whether the country will be better off in four years, 49/46, compared to 76/19 in 2008.