Viral leadership
Not so long ago, I was musing to myself on some of Ronald Reagan's bon mots; how he used self-deprecating humour to disarm his detractors. While his rise to the highest office was met with derision from some quarters, he oversaw some truly ground-breaking moments in history, and has generally positive approval ratings. Yet, John Hinckley Jr attempted his assassination.
John F. Kennedy has the highest average Gallup approval rating of any US President since 1937, although his presidency was arguably only just coming out of its honeymoon period when he died. He also oversaw some truly ground-breaking moments in history. Yet he was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald—conspiracy theories notwithstanding.
Orange Don
is probably the most divisive US President in recent years, if not ever. He is crude; ignorant; chauvinistic; dishonourable; combative; volatile; querulous; egocentric; and, above all, undiplomatic. Furthermore, in contrast to Reagan and JFK, his approval ratings are consistently unimpressive. Yet no one's had a go
at him.
But, perhaps his assassin could be much, much smaller than a man with a gun. (crossedfingers)
There's a bewildering array of opinion polls on US presidents, and even the Gallup poll has different ways of looking at the data, nevertheless the overall picture for Trump's incumbency is fairly consistent.