Trump-era record | Eight in 10 Americans think country is headed in wrong direction

More Americans are pessimistic about the direction of their country than at any point during Donald Trump’s presidency, as the nation continues to struggle with the coronavirus, protests against police brutality that have at times turned violent, and a venomous presidential election that has exposed deep political divides.

Roughly eight in 10 Americans say the country is going in the wrong direction, according to a new poll from the Associated Press and the NORC Centre for Public Affairs Research.

Just 38 percent of those polled said the state of the national economy is good, down nearly half from 67 percent in January, before Covid-19 was known to have reached US shores.

The numbers do not portend well for Trump, whose handling of the coronavirus pandemic received support from just 32 percent of respondents to the AP poll.

With just 100 days before the election on 3 November, the president appears to be taking several steps to shore up political excitement among his most loyal base of supporters.

He has deployed federal law enforcement units to cities such as Portland, Oregon, and Chicago to underscore his image as a law-and-order president. He has recently adopted a new, more somber tone on the coronavirus pandemic, wearing a mask and calling himself “patriotic” for doing so.

“It will probably, unfortunately, get worse before it gets better,” Trump told reporters at the White House last week, shedding his Covid-19 happy talk before minutes later offering a piece of advice: “Get a mask. Whether you like the mask or not, get a mask. … They have an effect.”

The president has, of course, demonstrated renewed focus on weighty issues before, only to revert back to his combative brand of politics that often sidetracks the national discussion away from such issues.

It has not been a good summer for Trump in either national polling or among swing-state voters.

He trails his Democratic opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, by double-digits nationally in some polls, and faces big margins in key swing states such as Florida, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

The president still holds an edge over Biden in how confident voters are in each candidate’s ability to shepherd the economy, those polls have found.

Trump’s top advisers have also tried to hammer that advantage, going on Sunday morning shows this week talking about, as White House economic adviser Larry Kudlow calls it, the “boom” of the post-COVID economy.

Biden is more than happy to keep the attention on Trump — and not himself — as the campaign hits the stretch run.

“People are sick and tired of a government that is divided and broken and unable to get things done. What people feel like they’re getting from Trump right now is a hodgepodge mess of self-interested political talk,” Biden’s deputy campaign manager Kate Bedingfield said in a statement to the AP.