President Biden may be regretting some of the shots he took at former President Trump on the campaign trail, like calling him an "existential threat" to the United States, a "clown" and "the worst president we've ever had."
Because if Trump truly were those things and yet his poll numbers are not as bad as Biden's, that's a problem for the current president, which is why he's reportedly "seething that his standing is now worse" than his predecessor's, according to Politico.
"The president has expressed exasperation that his poll numbers have sunk below those of Donald Trump, whom Biden routinely refers to in private as 'the worst president' in history and an existential threat to the nation's democracy," Politico reports.
Biden's poll numbers tanked last summer after the Afghanistan withdrawal and have only fallen since then.
Now, the percentage of the population that supports him has fallen just below those who back his Republican 2020 opponent, according to one poll aggregator.
Another tracker, Civiqs, shows Biden with an approval rating below 50 percent in every US state except for Hawaii, where he's polling at 52 percent approval.
'He’s now lower than Trump, and he’s really twisted about it,' someone close to the administration told NBC News.
The president is backed by 40.7 percent of Americans as of Tuesday, while 41.6 percent of voters supported Trump at this point in his term, according to FiveThirtyEight's average of multiple recent polls.
The number is now below that of every one of his predecessors since the end of World War II. Trump's rating had long been an exception to that benchmark.
Biden's disapproval rating on his 496th day in office, the most current data, was also slightly above Trump's. An average 54.1 percent of Americans expressed their unhappiness with Biden now compared to 52.9 who disapproved of the Republican leader. (Daily Mail)
According to Politico, the West Wing thinks there's still time to turn things around before the midterms by putting the president "on the road to highlight progress being made."
