Trump going downhill
Donald Trump started off his second term as United States President on a very low note with the American people, with his net approval at +7 (see “Trump’s numbers are weak,” 2/8/25). But now (as of 3/6/25), polling aggregator Nate Silver of Silver Bulletin has him at 48.0 percent approval and 47.9 disapproval, or only net +0.1. His vice president, JD Vance, has worse scores, with his own net approval several points in the negative range.
From time to time, Social Weather Stations (SWS) polls Filipinos’ trust in world leaders. American presidents, prior to Trump, got healthy positive numbers. I recall that Saddam Hussein’s net trust rating was in the minus-70s, which we call “execrable.” I think we forgot to do a poll on former US president Joe Biden.
Trust in the leader versus trust in the country. A person’s feelings about an individual leader are separate from those toward the leader’s country. We Filipinos generally have positive trust for the countries which host many of our workers, such as Saudi Arabia and countries in Europe, even without being able to identify the main political leaders of these countries.
The United States has always been the country most trusted by Filipinos; but how about Donald Trump? China is always the country most distrusted; but how about its leader Xi Jinping? The intense attitudes of former president Rodrigo Duterte, negative towards the US and positive towards China, never made a dent in Filipino trust for the former (a “very good” +61 as of December 2024) nor in the distrust for the latter (a “bad” -30).
Duterte tried to stir up ill will against the US by recalling the massacres of Filipinos during the Philippine-American War, some 120 years ago. But we have long gotten over that, just as we have gotten over the atrocities committed in the Philippines by the Japanese military in World War II, which ended 80 years ago. Japan’s net trust rating is a “good” +38 as of 2024, by the way.
In 2024, Filipino trust ratings for Israel (+9), Russia (-4), and Ukraine (-4) were all “neutral,” which is our term for being single-digit (see the 2025 SWS Survey Review, www.sws.org.ph). But how do we Filipinos feel about Benjamin Netanyahu, Vladimir Putin, or Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in particular?
There are multiple polls in every country (see my “Ukrainian opinion polls,” 3/5/22). I have met many pollsters personally—including Chinese, Israelis, Palestinians, and Russians, and as a rule found them competent and well-meaning. Just last week, the International Social Survey Program, which SWS joined in 1990, announced that it is admitting Ukraine. We look forward to meeting our Ukrainian counterparts soon.
Trust in the Pope. SWS has done polls about regard for the popes who have visited our country, and always found them given extremely high marks from the Filipino people. Needless to say, no one took seriously former president Duterte’s badmouthing of Pope Francis when he visited us.
Pope Francis is now quite ill in Rome, and Filipinos the world over are joined in fervent prayer for his recovery. In Francis’ autobiography “Hope,” I was struck most by his quotation from a short story by Jorge Luis Borges:
“Cain and Abel came upon each other after Abel’s death. They were walking through the desert, and they recognized each other from afar, since both men were very tall. The two brothers sat on the ground, made a fire, and ate. They sat silently, as weary people do, when dusk begins to fall. In the sky, a star glimmered, though it had not yet been given a name. In the light of the fire, Cain saw that Abel’s forehead bore the mark of the stone, and he dropped the bread he was about to carry to his mouth and asked his brother to forgive him. ‘Was it you that killed me, or did I kill you?’ Abel answered, ‘I don’t remember anymore; here we are, together, like before.’ ‘Now I know that you have truly forgiven me,’ Cain said, ‘because forgetting is forgiving. I, too, will try to forget…’”
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Contact: mahar.mangahas@sws.org.ph
