Drudge Report Jabs Trump With Scathing Jimmy Carter Comparison

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Matt Drudge’s eponymous news aggregator, the Drudge Report, hit President Donald Trump where it hurts the most on Tuesday with a scathing headline and lead image comparing the president to Jimmy Carter.

Under a side-by-side photo of Trump and Carter ran the headlines, “TRUMP APPROVAL: 32%” and “MATCHING CARTER LOWS.”

The first headline linked out to a new poll from American Research Group, finding Trump reaching below even the so-called Bush Line of sustained low approval.

“A total of 32% of Americans say they approve of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president and 63% say they disapprove of the way Trump is handling his job according to the latest survey from the American Research Group. In March, 34% of Americans approved of the way Trump was handling his job and 63% disapproved,” noted the poll’s summary.

The second link was to a Statista.com graph of Carter’s average approval rating as president, which showed multiple prolonged dips into the low 30s.

Drudge’s blaring comparison comes days after the Wall Street Journal reported on Trump’s increasing fears that his war in Iran could end in political disaster.

“It seemed like Donald Trump’s appetite for risk had run out, and his fears were ramping up,” wrote the Journal’s Josh Dawsey and Annie Linskey. They added:

It was Good Friday afternoon in a nearly empty West Wing soon after the president learned that an American jet had been shot down in Iran, with two airmen missing. Trump screamed at aides for hours. The Europeans aren’t helping, he said repeatedly. Gas prices averaged $4.09. Images of the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis—one of the biggest international policy failures of a presidency in recent times—had been looming large in his mind, people who have spoken to him said.

They then quoted Trump from March saying, “If you look at what happened with Jimmy Carter…with the helicopters and the hostages, it cost them the election. What a mess.”

Trump has long spoken publicly about Carter’s failed rescue attempt of the hostages taken in the U.S. Embassy in the late 1970s and how that defined Carter’s presidency in the eyes of the public.

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