“I feel sorry for him because he has a position that he can’t handle or that he doesn’t know how to handle,” said Grace Sweet, 88, a retired guidance counselor from Jackson, Miss. “I don’t believe anything he says. I really don’t.”
The partisan split on trusting the information Mr. Trump delivers has been striking. A new poll by Politico and Morning Consult found that 79 percent of Republicans were satisfied with the quality of the information about the pandemic that they were getting from Mr. Trump, while only 16 percent of Democrats said they were.
And even among Republicans, there has been a notable split between those who watched Fox News regularly, and those who did not. Fox News viewers were 15 points more likely to say Mr. Trump “got it about right” when the coronavirus began to spread than those who did not watch, according to a poll by Navigator Research, which is overseen by leaders of several progressive organizations.
While some recent polls have suggested that confidence in Mr. Trump’s handling of the outbreak was slipping, a recent Quinnipiac University poll his approval rating sits at about 45 percent, his highest rating in that poll since taking office.
One of those who supports the president is Henry Louden, 53, a developer in Miami Beach interviewed Thursday night. Mr. Trump, he said, was doing “the best he can” given that he was confronting a “new crisis.”
Mr. Louden, whose 19-year-old son tested positive for the virus after going on a spring break trip to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, despite warnings about the pandemic, admitted that he found it unhelpful when Mr. Trump said he would not wear a mask, despite guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advising people to do so.
“He could have said he will consider it,” Mr. Louden said. But what he viewed as a misstep barely figured in his overall assessment of Mr. Trump’s performance.
Source Article from https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/12/us/politics/trump-coronavirus-briefings.html
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