Justin Fox, Columnist

At the G7, Trump Is One of the Popular Ones

When it comes to approval ratings, only Japan’s Shinzo Abe has him beat.

August 23, 2019 at 5:25 PM UTC

Justin Fox is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering business, economics and other topics involving charts. A former editorial director of the Harvard Business Review, he is author of “The Myth of the Rational Market.”

They like him, they really like him (relatively speaking)
Photographer: The Washington Post/The Washington Post

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Donald Trump is an unpopular president. According to the Real Clear Politics polling average as of Friday afternoon, only 43.3% of Americans approve of his performance. FiveThirtyEight, which weights polls by quality, sample size and partisan lean, puts the average at 41.6%.

But as the president meets with leaders of the other G7 countries in the French resort city of Biarritz this weekend, he can take solace in the fact that he’s more popular than almost all of his peers. The lone exception seems to be Japanese premier Shinzo Abe, whose cabinet’s approval rating is 48.8% (to only 35% disapproval) in the Japan Political Pulse poll aggregator maintained by the Sasakawa Peace Foundation USA.