By Jason Lange
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Donald Trump’s public approval rating edged down to its lowest level since his return to the White House, as Americans showed signs of wariness over his efforts to broaden his power, a Reuters/Ipsos poll that closed on Monday found.
Some 42% of respondents to the six-day poll approved of Trump’s performance as president, down from 43% in a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted three weeks earlier, and from 47% in the hours after his January 20 inauguration.
The start of Trump’s term has left his political opponents stunned as he has signed dozens of executive orders expanding his influence over both government departments and over private institutions such as universities and law firms.
While Trump’s approval rating remains higher than the ratings seen during most of his Democratic predecessor’s presidency, the results of the Reuters/Ipsos poll suggest many Americans are uncomfortable with his moves to punish universities he sees as too liberal and to install himself as the board chair of the Kennedy Center, a major theater and cultural institution in Washington.
Some 83% of the 4,306 respondents said that the U.S. president must obey federal court rulings even if he doesn’t want to. Trump administration officials could face criminal contempt charges for violating a federal judge’s order halting deportations of alleged members of a Venezuelan gang who had no chance to challenge their removals.
Fifty-seven percent - including one-third of Republicans - disagreed with the statement that "it’s okay for a U.S. president to withhold funding from universities if the president doesn’t agree with how the university is run."
Trump, who has argued universities are failing to fight antisemitism on campus, has frozen vast sums of federal money budgeted for U.S. universities, including more than $2 billion for Harvard University alone.
A similar share of respondents - 66% - said they did not think the president should be in control of premier cultural institutions such as national museums and theaters. Trump last month ordered the Smithsonian Institution, the vast museum and research complex that is a premier exhibition space for U.S. history and culture, to remove "improper" ideology.
On a range of issues, from inflation and immigration to taxation and rule of law, the Reuters/Ipsos poll showed that Americans who disapproved of Trump’s performance outnumbered those who approved on every issue in the poll. On immigration, his strongest area of support, 45% of respondents approved of Trump’s performance but 46% disapproved.
The poll had a margin of error of about 2 percentage points.
Some 59% of respondents - including a third of Republicans - said America was losing credibility on the global stage.
Three-quarters of respondents said Trump should not run for a third term in office -- a path Trump has said he would like to pursue, though the U.S. Constitution bars him from doing so. A majority of Republican respondents -- 53% -- said Trump should not seek a third term.