Winners, of course, do not seek comfort in relative performance. They simply plow ahead and keep winning.
Nonetheless, for fairness’ sake, one must occasionally take note of a remarkable achievement against all odds.
According to RealClear Polling, President Donald Trump’s second-term approval rating has consistently exceeded that of former President Barack Obama in 2013, the first year of Obama’s second term.
The same holds true, incidentally, for Trump and former President George W. Bush, whose approval numbers plummeted in 2005.
In fact, let us compare the trajectories for all three two-term presidents.
Bush opened 2005 with an approval rating around 51 percent. That rating remained largely steady, hitting 48 percent in July. By November, however, Bush’s approval rating had sunk as low as 38 percent.
Early in 2013, Obama enjoyed an approval rating north of 52 percent. By December, however, that number had fallen to around 40 percent.
Likewise, Trump opened 2025 with a 51 percent approval rating that has fallen to 44 percent currently.
In other words, all three presidents began their second terms with approval ratings higher than 50 percent. Only Bush and Obama, however, experienced double-digit declines in their approval ratings.
The real story, of course, involves Trump’s superior poll numbers compared to those of Obama.
After all, analyses have shown that the establishment media subjected Trump to somewhere between 92 percent and 95 percent negative coverage both before and during his second term.
Meanwhile, earlier this month, Obama hilariously defended the establishment media.
“I actually think — I actually think that the mainstream news still does a very good job of just presenting facts,” Obama said with a straight face. “I think cable, regardless of the cable station, has fallen prey to the same economic imperatives that we’re seeing in every other type of news, which is, you are deliberately controversial, deliberately aggressive, deliberately trying to make people feel angry and aggrieved, because that attracts attention.”
If the media fawned over me and my administration for eight years, I would defend it, too.
On the other hand, if the media attacked or lied about me 95 percent of the time, I would also dismiss it as “fake news.”
The truly remarkable thing about those approval numbers is that Trump has bested Obama nearly every day since July despite all that negative coverage.
Republicans, of course, endured lousy results during the 2025 elections. The party as a whole, therefore, must get its act together.
The fact remains, however, that Trump’s approval rating consistently exceeds those of his predecessors. And that means the establishment media has lost relevance.
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