56% Americans say Trump ‘tearing the country apart’

US President Donald Trump (Photo: AFP)


Fifty six per cent of Americans have said that they believed President Donald Trump was “tearing the country apart” instead of drawing people together, according to a new poll.

While the findings are sharply divided along partisan lines – with 15 per cent of Republicans describing Trump as “tearing the country apart” and a whopping 93 per cent of Democrats saying he is – only 33 per cent of voters overall said they believe the president is “drawing the country together”, the Fox News poll revealed on Wednesday.

The findings underscore a string of increasingly negative perceptions of the Trump White House, which continues to register low ratings on a wide array of issues, including its handling of North Korea, Russia, the environment, health care and race relations, with a majority of voters registering disapproval of each, reports Politico news.

A majority of voters did not approve of Trump’s handling of any of the major policy areas covered in the poll.

The President’s general approval rating remained at 41 per cent, the same score he received last month. Trump’s disapproval rating, meanwhile, reached a high of 55 per cent this month, the poll showed.

His handling of national events drew more mixed results, with a plurality of 44 per cent approving of his handling of the Hurricane Harvey relief efforts and a majority of 56 per cent disapproving of his response to the events in Charlottesville, Virginia, this month.

Among the most positive results in the poll were those on the economic front: 36 per cent said the economy is either in “excellent” or “good” shape, the highest ratings for the survey since August 2004.

The Fox News poll randomly sampled 1,006 registered voters via landline and cellphone from August 27 to 29.