Trump heads into Independence Day weekend with worst poll numbers since George HW Bush

Donald Trump is polling worse than any incumbent US president since George HW Bush, but unlike the late Republican he is not dogged by a third-party candidate.

A slew of national polls show former Vice President Joe Biden leading by nearly double-digits, and by as many as 14 percentage points in one recent survey. The presumptive Democratic nominee also leads the president by at least 6.5 points in four key battleground states that Mr Trump won in 2016.

Mr Trump is wrapping up several tumultuous weeks with a Friday night fireworks display and remarks at Mount Rushmore before doing the same on the National Mall on Saturday in Washington. While he will be in a celebratory mode for the country's 243rd birthday, there is little reason for the president to feel the same about his struggling re-election campaign.

He reportedly has admitted behind the scenes that he is trailing Mr Biden. So far, however, he has not made a major shakeup of his campaign team. But Mr Biden's success in polls in places like Florida and Ohio is forcing the Trump campaign to spend money in places it did not expect.

One GOP insider recently told The Independent that Mr Trump and his team realise he is in trouble, but called his plight mostly self-inflicted. That means he could still recover, the insider said, "but the clock is ticking."

With just four months until Election Day, an average of several polls calculated by RealClearPolitics shows Mr Trump with the support of 40.5 percent of the country. Two of the surveys in that tabulation put that figure at 38 percent and 39 percent, respectively.

No sitting president has had such dismal numbers since the elder Bush.

He was polling in the mid-30s during the summer of 1992. But George HW Bush was facing two general election foes, not just one.

Billionaire businessman Ross Perot and future President Bill Clinton were running against the 41st president. Mr Trump, however, has only Mr Biden as a serious contender.

When Mr Perot dropped out of the 1992 race, Mr Bush's support jumped to 48 per cent. But it wasn't long before it plummeted back into the 30s and Mr Clinton won the White House.

Mr Trump and his campaign team started the year hoping to rebuild the 2016 Electoral map that saw him defeat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rather easily. But after the coronavirus and racial inequality crises shook the country's confidence in the president, largely due to his own erratic behaviour, his poll numbers have dropped in key battleground states.

That's why one former White House official says Mr Trump, as of now, "can't win."

"The decline in President Trump's support since 2016 has not been confined to the blue states and has been close to uniform in the 13 states that could be in play in 2020," according to William Galston of the Brookings Institute.

"At the beginning of 2020, the Trump campaign believed that it could nail down the South and Southwest early in the contest and focus its resources on the states that made the difference in 2016 – Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin – plus targets of opportunity such as Minnesota and New Hampshire," he added. This plan is now obsolete. The president's prospects in the Electoral College are dismal – unless he can raise his standing across the country. Although this is not impossible, it will be challenging."