Any post-victory bounce for President-elect Donald Trump has been fleeting. | Getty Polls show Trump with historically low approval ratings Majorities of Americans view Trump unfavorably — and also disapprove of the way in which Trump has built his incoming administration.

Donald Trump will be sworn in as president in three days, but polls on the eve of his inauguration show Trump is earning historically low marks for his transition.

Trump’s poor poll numbers — ranging from personal favorability to ratings of his performance as president-elect to negative views of some of his major policy initiatives — stand in sharp contrast to the Republican-dominated Washington that would enable the real estate magnate to enact large parts of his agenda after he takes the oath of office on Friday.


The new surveys from CNN/ORC, ABC News/Washington Post and Monmouth University, all released Tuesday morning, are also a major break from recent presidential transitions. Past presidents-elect have been catapulted to the White House by a surge of popular opinion —even those elected under contentious and controversial circumstances.

But any post-victory bounce for Trump has been fleeting. In both the CNN/ORC and ABC News/Washington Post polls, majorities of Americans view Trump unfavorably — and also disapprove of the way in which Trump has built his incoming administration.

The CNN/ORC poll shows 53 percent of Americans view Trump unfavorably, while only 44 percent have a favorable opinion of the incoming president. In the ABC News/Washington Post poll, Trump’s favorable rating is just 40 percent, with 54 percent having an unfavorable opinion.

That, according to The Washington Post, makes Trump the least-popular incoming president of the past 40 years — by a large margin. Eight years ago, ABC News/Washington Post polling showed Barack Obama with a 79 percent favorable rating. Even George W. Bush — who lost the popular vote and was designated the next president only after a protracted recount in Florida — had a 62 percent favorable rating on the eve of his inauguration. Bush’s 36 percent unfavorable rating was the lowest of the modern era, until Trump’s 54 percent score in the new poll.

The Monmouth poll also shows Trump's favorable rating underwater: 34 percent favorable, versus 46 percent unfavorable. (Monmouth offered respondents a "no opinion" option, leading to lower percentages for both favorable and unfavorable than other pollsters.)

Americans also have negative perceptions of the Trump transition. Both surveys show only 4 in 10 Americans approve of the way Trump is handling the transition. In the CNN/ORC poll, 52 percent disapprove of Trump’s transition, and 54 percent disapprove of Trump’s handling of the transition in the ABC News/Washington Post poll.

It’s a huge contrast from just eight years ago, when pre-inauguration CNN/ORC and ABC News/Washington Post polls pegged Obama’s approval rating at 84 percent and 80 percent, respectively.

Trump responded to the poor numbers in a Twitter post Tuesday morning, spuriously suggesting the news organizations had “rigged” the polls to paint Trump in a negative light. “The same people who did the phony election polls, and were so wrong, are now doing approval rating polls,” Trump said on Twitter. “They are rigged just like before.”

The ABC News/Washington Post poll includes other indicators of Americans’ lack of confidence in Trump. A 52 percent majority says Trump, who won 305 electoral votes, is not qualified to serve as president. And only 15 percent of Americans have “a great deal of confidence” in Trump to make the right decisions for the country’s future, while 34 percent have no confidence in Trump at all.

Rep. Sean Duffy (R-Wis.), a vice chairman on the Trump transition team’s executive committee, blamed the president-elect’s sagging approval numbers on his seemingly constant battling with the media. He recalled concern in the transition’s early days that Trump was not quickly announcing Cabinet picks and that the president-elect’s team was in disarray, concerns that were eventually allayed as the incoming administration began to fill out.

But regular bouts of conflict with the press have continued, Duffy said, to Trump’s detriment.

“Listen, I think this has been a pretty combative relationship between Donald Trump and the press. And frankly, I think the press has been tougher on Donald Trump than most other president-elects. And as a president-elect, Donald Trump has been harder on the press,” he told CNN’s “New Day” on Tuesday morning. “What's actually happening here is the public fight that Mr. Trump is having with CNN and other media groups is taking some skin off his poll numbers, and it's gone down.”

Duffy — who has been mentioned as a potential challenger to Sen. Tammy Baldwin (D-Wis.) next year — was encouraged by one finding in the ABC News/Washington Post poll: 61 percent of Americans still see Trump as well-positioned to improve the U.S. economy. Should the president-elect come through on his pledge to bring jobs back to the U.S. and implement other beneficial economic policies, “these other numbers that we discussed can actually come up in the not-too-distant future,” Duffy said.

That poll also tested eight separate policy items Trump is likely to pursue in his first year as president, and only three earn majority support. Seventy-two percent back “deporting about two million undocumented immigrants who have been convicted of a crime,” a less restrictive policy than the one on which Trump campaigned: deporting all undocumented immigrants but allowing some to return later.

Trump also earns majority support for “renegotiating the NAFTA trade agreement with Mexico and Canada” (57 percent) and “punishing companies that move jobs from the U.S. to other countries” — both key elements of Trump’s agenda that, to some degree, diverge from GOP orthodoxy.

Other Trump initiatives are less popular. Only 31 percent want the U.S. to withdraw “from the main international treaty that tries to address climate change,” with 56 percent in opposition. Thirty-seven percent want the U.S. to withdraw “from the nuclear agreement with Iran,” while 46 percent oppose doing so. Just 32 percent want to ban “most Muslims who are not U.S. citizens from entering the United States,” and 63 percent a Muslim ban.

Americans are divided equally on repealing the 2010 health care law, the poll shows: 46 percent support repeal, and 47 percent disapprove. Legislative maneuvers to repeal the law are already underway on Capitol Hill, but Republicans have yet to agree on a path forward for new health care legislation that would “replace” the provisions of the Affordable Care Act.

With Republicans poised to take control of all lawmaking in Washington, it’s not clear whether Trump’s agenda will be slowed by the new president’s poor poll numbers. Congressional Republicans have thus far deferred to Trump, even when his policies have conflicted with their preferences.

A Huffington Post/YouGov poll last week shows Trump with the upper hand. A majority of Republicans, 57 percent, said they would take Trump’s side in a conflict with House Speaker Paul Ryan, while just 35 percent would line up behind the Wisconsin Republican.

And despite Trump's poor numbers, some Americans are still hopeful his administration will be successful. Half of Americans surveyed by Monmouth University said they are "very" or "somewhat optimistic" about Trump's policies, greater than the combined 43 percent who described themselves as "very" or "somewhat pessimistic." But the 30 percent who say they are "very pessimistic" exceeds the 24 percent who are "very optimistic" about Trump's policies.

Louis Nelson contributed to this report.