As President Donald Trump prepares for a high-stakes summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un on Tuesday, Americans are uncertain what to expect from the president’s attempts to make a deal, and less than a third of voters believe the ultimate outcome will be a positive one for the United States.
According to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, about a quarter of voters — 26 percent — think that Trump will demand too much in the negotiations and thus scuttle an agreement. An additional 10 percent say Trump will give up too much.
A combined 31 percent of voters are more optimistic, saying either that the ultimate agreement will be fair to both sides (17 percent) or that Trump will secure a deal that is better for the United States than for the North Korean regime (14 percent).
Another 31 percent say they don’t know enough to voice an opinion.
Unsurprisingly, Republicans express much more confidence in the outcome of the negotiations than Democrats. Six-in-ten GOP voters say that there will eventually be a fair deal (30 percent) or a deal that’s particularly advantageous for the United States (29 percent). That’s compared with only 8 percent of Democratic voters who expect a positive result.
Among Democrats, a combined 51 percent expect a negative outcome from the talks, with 36 percent saying Trump will demand too much and 15 percent saying he will give up too much.
The extraordinary summit in Singapore this week will make Trump the first sitting U.S. president to meet with a North Korean leader. Trump said recently of Kim Jong Un: “I think he wants to see something incredible happen for the people of North Korea.”
But despite the president’s recent praise for him, American voters have little regard for Kim, the poll shows. Just 3 percent have a positive impression of Kim Jong Un, while 72 percent have a negative one. That’s on par with Americans’ attitudes toward Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi in back in 2011.
The live-caller NBC/WSJ poll was conducted June 1-4 among 900 registered voters — about half contacted via cell phone — and the overall margin of error in the poll is plus-minus 3.3 percentage points.
