President Donald Trump’s advice on treating the coronavirus is more harmful than helpful a plurality of respondents said according to a new poll released Tuesday in the wake of the president’s suggestion that Americans ingest or inject themselves with disinfectants.
The poll, conducted by Monmouth University, found that 42 percent of those polled said the president’s rhetoric on coronavirus treatments, which has also included promoting unproven medications, has been harmful. A third of respondents said the president’s treatment advice has been helpful, while 23 percent said his public medical pronouncements are neither particularly harmful nor helpful.
The poll, which was conducted last week after Trump significantly scaled back his daily coronavirus task force briefings, found a predictable partisan divide on the subject of Trump’s medical advice. More than two thirds of Republicans, 68 percent, said they consider Trump’s advice helpful, slightly less than the 72 percent of Democrats who said it’s been harmful.
There is slightly more agreement over whether Trump has been consistent in the task force briefings from day to day, with most Americans — 55 percent — calling his remarks inconsistent, compared with 36 percent who say Trump has been largely consistent in the briefings. The partisan divide on this issue remained, the poll found, with majorities of Democrats and independents calling Trump inconsistent, while only 18 percent of Republicans agreed with that assessment.
“It is difficult to look at the briefing transcripts and not see inconsistency from one day to the next. These poll results are just another reminder of how people filter information to reframe some facts and dismiss others in order to maintain their own internal consistency when it comes to perceptions of Trump,” Patrick Murray, the director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute, said in a statement that accompanied the poll’s release.
Those numbers on Trump’s coronavirus rhetoric come as public approval of his handling of the pandemic continues to slip. Forty-two percent of respondents said the president has done a good job, compared to 51 percent who said he’s done a bad job. The most recent numbers represent a dip from March’s Monmouth poll, when Trump received positive marks for his handling of the pandemic: 50 percent of those polled said he’d done a good job versus 45 percent who said he’d done a bad job in addressing coronavirus.
Over the past few months, Trump’s overall approval rating has continued to slide. The latest poll shows 43 percent approve of the president’s overall job performance while 51 percent disapprove, down a hair from 44 percent approve, 49 percent disapprove last month.
While both general approval of Trump and approval of his handling of coronavirus have ticked down, Americans continue to give federal health officials and their own local leaders high marks on their handling of the virus.
Approval for federal health agencies sits 21 points higher than the president’s, with just a quarter who disapprove.
Overall, nearly three-quarters of Americans say their governor is doing a good job handling the outbreak, while 22 percent say their governor is doing a bad job.
“People are looking for a steady hand in a crisis. State officials and public health professionals have largely been consistent in their approach to the pandemic,” Murray said. “This is one reason why satisfaction with their response has been high and stable throughout, unlike views of the president’s actions.”
Despite protests bubbling up across the country in recent weeks by crowds of demonstrators opposing their state’s strict social distancing requirements, putting pressure on governors to reopen, such sentiments continue to be in the minority, the poll found.
Nearly two thirds of respondents said that they fear states will begin lifting coronavirus restrictions too quickly, more than double the 29 percent who worry states won’t move quickly enough to relax their mandates. More than half, 56 percent, say leaders should prioritize public health concerns over the desire to avoid an extended economic rout, which just a third say should be more important.
Furthermore, about six in 10 of those polled said measures taken by their state governor to address the outbreak have been appropriate, with 22 percent saying those mandates have not gone far enough.
Just 17 percent say the measures have gone too far — though that number is up from 8 percent in April and 9 percent in March.
The Monmouth University Poll was sponsored and conducted by the Monmouth University Polling Institute from April 30 to May 4 with a national random sample of 808 adults age 18 and older contacted by phone. The results of the full survey have a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
