It’s getting harder and harder for the lamestream news media to ignore the accomplishments — and the soaring job approval — of President Donald Trump and the Republican Party he leads, as evidenced by the fact that the anti-Trump media cable is coming around and begrudgingly offering him some much-deserved praise. The latest example is CNN, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the network’s executive editors were taking big pulls of Jack Daniels during a segment on Wednesday as data cruncher Harry Enten revealed how much Americans love Trump’s law-and-order approach to crime.
Host Kate Bolduan opened the segment with this: “So President Trump in the last few days has become laser focused on something peculiar. His plan to try and rebuild and reopen the former prison Alcatraz in order to hold what he calls the nation’s most ruthless and violent offenders. Now that project would be wildly expensive at a time when his administration is so focused on slashing federal agency budgets across the government.”
She added, “So why is the president putting this idea out there now? CNN’s Harry Enten is looking into that for you today. The president talks often and when he talks about Alcatraz, he also reiterates law and order. A key phrase and a key issue that was important during his campaign. What does that have to do with this, do you think, and why it could be driving?”
Here’s how the exchange went:
HARRY ENTEN, CNN CHIEF DATA ANALYST: Yes, I mean, it speaks to one of Trump’s best issues, right? The idea Alcatraz, you think law and order, you think Donald Trump. I mean, look here.
All right. Net approval rating handling crime. What do we have here? We have a positive rating for Donald Trump, even in the most recent polling. Look at that at plus two points.
Far better than Joe Biden, who was so far underwater. My goodness, he was setting records at minus 26 points. You rarely ever see it. So Donald Trump ran in part on law and order. It was one of the reasons that he got elected. And at this particular point, Americans like what they’re hearing from him on the issue of crime. And you see this right here with a plus two net approval rating.
Far better than Joe Biden left office with back in 2024.
BOLDUAN: How does this then compare to how people viewed it in the first term?
ENTEN: Yes. So this is another interesting thing, right? We compare Donald Trump’s first term to now his second term.
And what do we see here? We see that Donald Trump’s net approval rating on handling crime is far better now at plus two points. The view of term number two.
Then we go back to a retrospective approval rating back in March of 2024, in which he was underwater at minus 13 points. So he’s doing 15 points better in terms of how people are viewing his handling of crime now than he was doing back in March of 2024.
So when you hear Donald Trump talking about stuff like Alcatraz. Yes, I know it’s late night fodder for a lot of different folks. But what it actually speaks to is Donald Trump focusing the American people’s attention on an issue in which they actually do like what he’s doing. And you see it here with a net positive approval rating of plus two points, which, again, is 15 points higher than what we saw for Donald Trump in term numero uno.
Enten continued on the theme: “So, you know, we think about crime and we say, OK, it’s one thing how they’re viewing Trump. But are their views of overall crime changing as Donald Trump gets into the White House? And what do we see here? Well, the percentage of Americans who worry a great deal about crime, we actually have seen that percentage drop over the last year. It was 53 percent last year.
“And look at where we are now. We’re at 47 percent. It’s the first time in about five years in which the percentage of Americans worry a great deal about crime has actually dropped under the 50 percent mark,” he said. “And more than that, it’s a rare issue that we’ve seen from 2024 to 2025, in which the percentage of Americans who worry a great deal about a particular issue has actually dropped by five points or more. In fact, it’s one of only two issues in which we saw a five-point decline among both Democrats and Republicans. So I think Donald Trump is going to continue on this law and order issue because the bottom line is it is working for him.”