President-elect Donald Trump has rocked the boat and roiled critics with some of his controversial transition picks and campaign promises, but most Americans believe that’s just what he should be doing.
Nearly 6 in 10 American adults approve of the way Trump is handling his transition, according to a CBS/YouGov poll, a shocker for the mainstream media and Democrats who have been treating the transition with disdain.
Even though Trump has been forced to withdraw his attorney general pick — former Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz — and other appointees have been under attack, that hasn’t clouded the public’s view of the transition, the poll found.
A strong majority of Americans say they back his Cabinet picks, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Pete Hegseth. And 57 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s plan to carry out mass deportations of illegal immigrants.
The poll also revealed strong partisan differences in how Trump’s upcoming term is viewed. A whopping 95 percent of Republicans feel optimistic or excited about Trump’s second term, while just 15 percent of Democrats feel the same way.
The poll shows that while official Washington may be shocked at some of Trump’s picks, the public is largely satisfied with them.
The former president has shown before that he likes the “shock and awe” strategy of revealing unorthodox picks but ones who are loyal to his agenda. That is the case with Hegseth, a Fox News contributor who is Trump’s pick to lead the Pentagon, who is under scrutiny for a 2017 sexual encounter that police investigated.
No charges were filed and Hegseth claims the encounter was consensual. He paid a settlement to the woman involved to avoid a lawsuit.
There’s no indication that Trump intends to withdraw the appointment to lead the Defense Department.
“It’s very simple,” Hegseth said when confronted by the media last week. “The matter was fully investigated and I was completely cleared. And that’s where I’m going to leave it.”
Trump has also picked several loyalists, including Kennedy, son of the slain Robert F. Kennedy, to lead the nation’s federal health agencies, which has rocked the mainstream medical community.
The New York Times reported that “some doctors and scientists are bracing themselves for the gutting of public health agencies, a loss of scientific expertise and the injection of politics into realms once reserved for academics. The result, they fear, could be worse health outcomes, more preventable deaths and a reduced ability to respond to looming health threats, like the next pandemic.”
But the polls suggest most Americans welcome the unorthodox changes to business as usual, and don’t mind having Kennedy at the helm of Health and Human Services.
Joe Battenfeld is a veteran Boston Herald political columnist and multimedia reporter.
