Americans don’t trust Donald Trump. They never really have. – CNN

For any normal president, those numbers -- especially this early in his time in office -- would be cause for total and complete panic.

For Trump, they're just more of the same.

How? Because Hillary Clinton's numbers on the "honest and trustworthy" question -- 36% said she was/61% said she was not -- weren't much better. In fact, one in five voters who said that Trump was neither honest nor trustworthy voted for him! Of the three in 10 voters who said neither candidate was honest, Trump beat Clinton 43% to 40%.

Some -- Trump's base -- believed that he was telling the truth in spite of all of those numbers. That if the media said he was lying, he must be telling the truth.

But there were also a large number of Trump voters who knew he was lying and misleading at a record rate and just didn't care. Or, to put a finer point on it: They didn't care about Trump's lies as much as they cared about throwing out the status quo and electing someone they thought would be a change agent.

In other words: It was always a relatively small faction of Trump voters who chose him because they believed he was a truth-teller. Most Trump voters made peace with the fact he often exaggerated and straight-out lied because, well, all politicians lie. And at least Trump was brazen about it.

And yet, Trump's numbers on being honest and trustworthy are basically the same as they have always been: Bad but with no obvious downward plunge.

What that suggests to me is that drawing conclusions about Trump's political future based on how few people trust him may miss the mark.

A better potential measure? How people view his management of the country. After all, the basic conceit of Trump's campaign was that the people running the government were dumb and bad. And that he was smart and good. Elect him President and he would, to borrow a phrase, make America great again.

In November 2016, a week after the election, 50% of people said they believed Trump could "manage the government effectively." In the new CNN poll. just 36% say he is an effective manager.

That number is where Trump's real political peril, ahem, lies.

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Americans don't trust Donald Trump. They never really have. - CNN

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