By Chris Kahn
NEW YORK (Reuters) – Half of Americans believe media reports that President Donald Trump referred to U.S. soldiers as “suckers” and “losers,” despite his denials, but the alleged comments do not appear to have hurt his standing among Republicans, a Reuters/Ipsos poll shows.
The national public opinion poll, released Thursday, found that 50% of U.S. adults said they found the reports to be credible, while 37% said they did not and 13% said they were not sure.
Yet most Republicans still hold favorable views of Trump, and a majority of Republicans say the recent news has not influenced their choice for president.
Trump has denounced multiple news reports that he repeatedly disparaged American servicemen, including a report in The Atlantic magazine that he had once called dead U.S. marines “suckers” for getting killed, and that a cemetery of fallen American servicemen in Europe was filled with “losers.”
The poll shows that while public disapproval of Trump has increased slightly over the past week, it is mostly unchanged among Republicans.
Republicans have unflinchingly backed Trump since before he won the White House, with little variation in their approval of him during events including his impeachment in the U.S. House of Representatives.
The poll, conducted on Tuesday and Wednesday, showed 58% of Republicans or Republican-leaning independents said Trump’s alleged comments have had no impact on their decision to vote for him. Another 18% said they were now more likely to vote for Trump and 14% said they were less so. The remaining 10% said they are not sure.
The poll also showed that 85% of Republicans have a favorable impression of Trump, about the same as last week, and 84% said they would vote for his re-election while 8% would back Biden.
Among all likely voters, Trump trails Biden nationally by 12 percentage points.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll was conducted online, in English, throughout the United States. It gathered responses from 1,004 American adults, including 855 registered voters. It has a credibility interval, a measure of precision, of about 4 percentage points.
(Reporting by Chris Kahn; Editing by Scott Malone and David Gregorio)
