(CNN) Donald Trump has never made it to the 50% approval mark in Gallup polling, which makes him the first president never to rise above the halfway mark in the poll. But he's pretty damn close right now.

In Gallup's latest poll released Tuesday morning, 49% approve of the job Trump is doing in office while 50% disapprove. Trump's previous high was in April 2019 when he got to 46% approval in Gallup. The first poll Gallup conducted when Trump became president in January 2017 showed him at 45% approval.

Trump's current 49% approval puts him ahead of where his predecessor -- Barack Obama -- was at this same time in his first term. (Obama was at 46% approval.) Which is absolutely remarkable, given the first 3+ years of Trump's presidency and the fact that he became just the third president in American history to be impeached by the House last month.

The Democratic-led impeachment effort likely contributed to Trump's strengthening numbers. You see it most clearly in the fact that 94% of self-identified Republicans in the poll said they approve of the job Trump is doing -- up 6 points from those who said the same thing in Gallup's poll last month. And that 94% approval is Trump's highest rating -- by 3 points -- ever among Republicans.

It's hard not to see the impeachment investigation in the House and subsequent trial in the Senate as the prime driver of the near-total fealty that Republicans are now exhibiting toward Trump. Trump, as well as his allies in the House and Senate, from the start have portrayed the impeachment proceedings as a purely partisan effort led by Democrats who just can't accept that Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016.

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