US braces for Trump's inauguration amid doubts, protests, partisan fights

Partisan feud fuels, confidence floundering, marches and protests on the way, while hundreds of thousands of supporters for Donald Trump's White House also being rallied to celebrate his Friday inauguration in and outside Washington D.C.


Low confidence:

Latest polls find US President Barack Obama will leave office Friday with his highest approval rating since June, 2009, his first year in office, while his successor Donald Trump is entering White House with lowest popularity rate as a president-elect in the past four decades.

About two-thirds (65 percent) say Obama's presidency was a success, including nearly half (49 percent) who say that was due to Obama's personal strengths rather than circumstances outside his control, according to a new CNN/ORC poll issued Wednesday. His approval rating stands at 60 percent days in the final days of his 8-year presidency.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump enters office as the most unpopular of at least the last seven newly elected presidents, a new ABC News/Washington Post poll finds, with ratings for handling the transition that are also vastly below those of his predecessors.

Sixty-one percent of Americans surveyed lack confidence in Trump to make the right decisions for the nation's future, only 40 percent see Trump favorably overall or approve of the way he has handled the transition, the national surveys shows.

However, these polls also show six out of ten Americans have high expectations on the newly elected US president on certain issues, especially the economy, jobs and fighting terrorism. About half of them also expect he can do well in three other issues: helping the middle class, handling the deficit and making Supreme Court appointments.

"The same people who did the phony election polls, and were so wrong, are now doing approval rating polls" Trump backfired on Twitter in response to the spate of negative poll results.

"They are rigged just like before", he claimed.

Though Trump will start his presidency with Republicans' majority in both chambers of Congress, his general unpopularity is an unprecedented hurdle, whose impact on his ability to govern remains to be seen, Justin McCarthy, a Gallup analyst, said earlier this week when his company issued similar poll results.
  [Xinhua/China]
19/1/17