Trump Says He Could Stay in Office, Amid Poor Approval Ratings

By Staff, Agencies

US President Donald Trump has suggested the American people would ask him to stay in the White House beyond two terms – in violation of the US constitution.

Lashing out after recent media coverage of polls which showed him losing in key 2020 battleground states to Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden, he said he could see himself staying in office beyond 2024.

“The good news is that at the end of 6 years, after America has been made GREAT again and I leave the beautiful White House [do you think the people would demand that I stay longer? KEEP AMERICA GREAT],” he wrote.

He also attacked The New York Times and Washington Post after they reported that his own campaign’s polling, along with publicly available data, showed he was behind many of the other top Democrats vying for their party’s nomination.

Calling them a “disgrace” and “the enemy of the people”, he has also claimed in recent days that his internal polling actually shows him “winning everywhere”.

Trump has repeatedly railed against the press and the negative coverage he has received first as a presidential candidate and then as a president.

He has also previously endorsed suggestions that he should stay in the White House after eight years as president, despite this running against the American constitution which states that presidents are limited to being elected to just two four-year terms.

The 22^nd amendment to the constitution was ratified in 1951, imposing those term limits.

Trump’s presidency has been dogged with low approval ratings since just after he took office in January of 2017.

While he enjoyed a small window in which his approval rating was higher than disapproval – a period of less than a month – his numbers have hovered just above 40 per cent ever since.

His current approval rating is 42.6 per cent, with 53 per cent of Americans saying they do not approve of the job he is doing as president, according to FiveThirtyEight.

That’s compared to the ratings seen by his predecessor Barack Obama, whose approval ratings during his presidency roughly oscillated between the low forties and mid-fifties – with the latter not being uncommon.

He had a high 59 per cent approval rating in the last poll of his presidency by Gallup.