THE PRESIDENT HOLDS – AT 9:51 A.M. ET:   There were headlines at the end of last week, reporting that Mr. Trump had hit 49% in the Rasmussen poll, based presumably on his State of the Union performance.  But could it hold?

The Dems and the mainstream media joined up in their usual unholy alliance to throw everything they had at the president, and I personally expected his numbers to dip at the start of this week.  I was wrong.  From Rasmussen: 

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Monday shows that 49% of Likely U.S. Voters approve of President Trump’s job performance. Forty-nine percent (49%) also disapprove.
The latest figures include 35% who Strongly Approve of the way the president is performing and 39% who Strongly Disapprove. This gives him a Presidential Approval Index rating of -4.

All three nights of this survey now follow the president’s well-received State of the Union address last week. Both Trump’s overall approval rating and his Presidential Approval Index rating remain at their highest levels in nearly a year.  

COMMENT:  Other polls, of course, have Mr. Trump lower.  But enough polling has now come in to demonstrate that the trend is clearly upward. 

This can reverse.  The president, to paraphrase a description by Churchill of our own secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, is a bull who brings his own china shop with him.   If Mr. Trump can avoid self-inflicted wounds, and keep the economy humming, he might just pull a Republican Congress out of November's fire.

February 5, 2018