Politics
JUST IN: Trump’s Approval Rating Surges To New High Amid LA Riots
A spike in popularity for President Donald Trump is buoying his handling of the Los Angeles riots as voters offer praise for the president’s ability to manage the crisis.
Morning Consult found that the president’s approval rating has surged to its highest level in months, underscoring the strong position Trump and his advisors believe him to be in as L.A. burns. The riots, now in their sixth day, came in response to an operation apprehending illegal immigrants, an issue where Trump already polls the strongest.
Asked about their approval of Trump, a solid 50% of voters agreed while 44% disapproved. That’s a +4 and -4 shift, respectively, in each direction since the pollsters released their last survey in May.
The results are the highest showing for Trump since January, when he was riding high on a wave of optimism about his second administration.
Stacked up against other world leaders, Trump appears to be doing quite well in the Morning Consult rankings. He is the seventh most popular leader out of all free countries surveyed by Morning Consult, falling behind those such as Indian’s Narenda Modi and Javier Milei of Argentina but ahead of U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer.
Other polls by CNN and CBS News found that a majority of Americans feel that the president’s deportation agenda is prioritizing dangerous criminals. A healthy 54% of respondents say they stand behind Trump’s immigration policies, while 46% disapprove.
The L.A. riots come after U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement conducted a raid at an L.A. area Home Depot, setting off a cascade of violent riots across the City of Angels. Two days of local leadership were enough for Trump, who federalized 4,000 members of the California National Guard and sent them to quell the unrest.
By Monday, the president had called up another 700 Marines to L.A., and by Tuesday, Mayor Karen Bass instituted an evening curfew in a desperate bid to keep city residents off the streets as vehicles and businesses were ablaze.
The imagery out of L.A. plays right into the hands of Trump, who was keen to position himself as a restorer of law and order in a blue enclave bereft of competent local officials.
“I like Gavin Newsom. He’s a nice guy, but he’s grossly incompetent, everybody knows that,” Trump said last week after the California governor sued him for calling up the National Guard.
Others on the ground during the city’s 1992 Rodney King riots believe Trump is right on the money.
Moses Castillo, a former LAPD detective, told Fox News that Bass and Newsom were too late to call for reinforcements.
“She’s now trying to play catch up,” Castillo said. “I think if she would have been very more forceful in the beginning that we’re not gonna tolerate these crimes and allow police officers to do their job and arrest people on site, I’d think it would have be different. Instead, she’s now saying it now that these crimes would not be tolerated, looting would not tolerated. But it’s a little bit too late.”
