Apr 12, 2016 4 min read

Donald Trump isn’t even in the White House yet, but he already succeeded in one of his goals.

“I’m very much a unifier,” the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination told the CBS-TV news program “Face the Nation” last month.

Indeed he is. Despite a closely divided electorate, and chasm-deep differences among voters on issues ranging from gay marriage to military spending, Trump knitted together our otherwise fractured polity on one point – it can’t stand him.

According to a poll released last week by the Associated Press and GfK, seven in 10 people have an unfavorable view of Trump. That includes almost half of Republicans. As the Associated Press reported, “It’s an opinion shared by majorities of men and women; young and old; conservatives, moderates and liberals; and whites, Hispanics and blacks – a devastatingly broad indictment of the billionaire businessman.”

Another poll, this one from Bloomberg Politics and Purple Strategies, found 70 percent of married women who plan to vote in the November general election have a negative opinion of Trump – an assessment that shouldn’t be surprising considering the stink of misogyny that surrounds Trump and his campaign. If Trump succeeds in becoming the GOP’s standard bearer, he will have to make up significant ground among this demographic if he hopes to be anything other than a spectator at next January’s inaugural festivities – 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney won the votes of married women by 53 percent and still lost the popular vote by 4 percent and by more than 100 votes in the Electoral College.

Additional polling by the Associated Press and GfK found, despite her own liabilities and less-than-robust favorability ratings, prospective Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton is trusted by more Americans to handle the wide range of issues a president must confront, from Supreme Court nominations to immigration and the economy.

Highlighting the qualms many voters have about Trump’s temperament, and whether they would want him to have the codes to launch nuclear weapons for four or eight years, one respondent from South Carolina who described himself as a Republican-leaning independent said he would “absolutely not” trust Trump to handle any of the issues facing the country and “he would have the U.S. in wars at the drop of a hat. He would make the international community angry at the United States.”

To further underscore how unpopular Trump is, yet another poll, this one from Washington Post-ABC News, found if he ends up being atop the Republican ticket, he would be the least popular major party nominee since 1984. “American politicians tend to be more unpopular than usual these days, but it’s hard to overstate how bad Trump’s numbers are with all Americans,” the Post reported.

On Sunday, The Boston Globe perpetrated what amounted to an elaborate stunt – the newspaper’s front page was filled with headlines that could come to pass if Trump becomes president, such as “Deportations to Begin,” “U.S. soldiers refuse orders to kill ISIS families” and “Markets sink as trade war looms.” In an editorial, the Globe said it published the satirical front page to show what America could be like if Trump becomes president.

It said “his vision of America promises to be as appalling in real life as it is in black and white on the page.”

If the polling is anything to go by, most Americans agree with the Globe and Trump will never have the opportunity to implement that vision. For that we can be thankful.