A construction crew installs new sections of the U.S.-Mexico border barrier replacing smaller fences as seen from Tijuana, Mexico, on Jan. 11, 2019. (Mario Tama/Getty Images)

Poll: Trump Voters Support National Emergency for Border Wall; Approval Rating at 50 Percent

Likely voters who support President Donald Trump welcomed the government shutdown and national emergency to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

“The president’s strongest supporters … favor the declaration of a presidential national emergency if necessary to get the job done,” said Rasmussen Reports this week.

Rasmussen, the polling agency favored by President Trump, said it found that “voters don’t think Democrats will ever okay funding for President Trump’s border wall.”

Meanwhile, 42 percent of likely voters favor the declaration of a national emergency to fund the border wall if Congress fails to pass a spending measure for it, the pollster said, adding that it’s up about 3 percentage points from a month ago.

Rasmussen polled 1,000 likely voters on Feb. 11 and Feb. 12, days before Trump declared a national emergency to fund the wall.

Meanwhile, on Feb. 15, Rasmussen found that 50 percent of likely U.S. voters approve of President Trump’s job performance, while 49 percent disapprove.

The pollster noted that on Feb. 15, 2011, during President Obama’s first term, 48 percent of voters approved of the job the former president was doing.

“Daily tracking results are collected via telephone surveys of 500 likely voters per night and reported on a three-day rolling average basis,” said Rasmussen.

Emergency

A national emergency was declared by President Trump on Friday in response to the humanitarian crisis at the southern border, effectively securing billions of dollars for the construction of the wall.

The president said that the declaration, along with a spending bill passed Congress, will secure about $8 billion, which is well above the $5.7 billion that Trump had originally requested.

On Friday, Trump criticized the intransigent Congress for not funding the wall.

“I’m very disappointed in certain people, a particular one, for not having pushed this faster,” Trump said during a White House press conference.

Drugs, gangs, and illegal immigrants are streaming across the border, Trump said. That’s why a wall is needed now, he said.

“We’re going to confront the national security crisis on our southern border and we’re going to do it one way or the other. We have to do it,” Trump said at the White House. “We have tremendous amounts of drugs flowing into our country, much of it coming from the southern border.”

Some $6.1 billion in wall funds will be sourced from the Department of Defense budget following the emergency declaration.

“I will sign the final order as soon as I get into the Oval Office and we will have a national emergency, and we will then get sued, and they will sue us in the Ninth Circuit, even though it shouldn’t be there, and then we will possibly get a bad ruling, and then we will get another bad ruling, and then we will end up in the Supreme Court, and hopefully we will get a fair shake, and we’ll win in the Supreme Court,” Trump said.