Earlier this month, The Post’s Jenna Johnson reported that Trump backers who once hung on the president’s every word are starting to pay less attention, in part because so much of the news about his presidency has been negative.
Trump encourages his base to ignore the mainstream news media and, instead, champions his Twitter feed as a source of unvarnished updates about his policies. (Critics would point out that this is an inaccurate description of his often fact-free social media presence.) But nearly 4 in 10 Trump supporters say that his tweets are “reckless and distracting,” according to the poll, while fewer than half find it “effective and informative.” Overall, nearly 70 percent of Americans fall into the former category. If Trump wants to use his Twitter account to step around the media, it doesn’t seem to be working.
Only a third of American adults think that Trump is proving to be a more effective leader than Obama was, the poll found. By a more than 2-to-1 margin, independents held the opposite view. Even 1 in 10 Trump supporters believed Obama to be more effective, twice the percentage of Democrats who thought Trump was more effective than Obama.
