Trump Approval Rating Sinks To Record Low As Ex-Aides Indicted

President Trump got a failing report card from Americans — a 33 percent approval rating in a Gallup Daily survey — Monday as the team led by special prosecutor Robert Mueller announced sweeping indictments against two former campaign aides and said a third adviser had admitted to lying to investigators about meeting Russian operatives to get dirt on Democrat Hillary Clinton.

The charges and the plea agreement are the opening salvo in Mueller's investigation into possible Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential campaign, and there were signals Monday that the probe is far from over. The White House has denied that the charges have anything to do with the Trump campaign.

Monday's Gallup Daily survey showed 62 percent of respondents have an unfavorable view of the president. His third quarter approval rating — 36.9 percent, down from 38.8 percent in the second quarter — was the lowest for the period of any president in seven decades, according to reports.

The Gallup Daily survey results are based on telephone interviews with approximately 1,500 adults nationwide. The survey has an error margin of 3 percentage points, Gallup said.

The Gallup Daily survey numbers were Trump’s lowest since taking office, and the lowest of any president since the end of President George W. Bush’s second term, CNN reported. Other presidents who got an approval rating as low were Harry Truman near the end of his term, Richard Nixon just before his resignation, and Jimmy Carter and George W.H. Bush near the time of their failed reelection bids.

Watch: President Trump's approval rating is at an all-time low

Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, and his business associate, Rick Gates were charged with conspiracy against the United States and various tax and money laundering charges in the 12-count indictment unsealed Monday. Both men have pleaded not guilty.

According to the indictment, Manafort and Gates were laundering money until at least 2016 to help cover up their work for former Ukraine President and pro-Russia strongman Viktor F. Yunakovyc, who was eventually forced to flee to Russia. They are charged with concealing about $75 million in payments from Ukraine and avoiding taxes on the income.

Also Monday, Mueller’s team said George Papadopoulos, who served as one of Trump's foreign policy advisers in 2016, has admitted to covering up contacts with people he believed worked for the Russian government during his time on the campaign. He is cooperating with Mueller's investigation, a sign that more indictments may be coming.

Mueller’s investigation is continuing, and the confession by Papadopoulos casts serious doubt on the president's claim that there was "no collusion" between Trump's campaign and the Kremlin.

In a press briefing Monday, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said the crimes in question had nothing to do with the campaign and argued that Democrat's funding of opposition research against Trump was the "real scandal."

What Sanders didn’t say was that the dossier that alleged a compromised relationship between the president and the Kremlin was initially funded by a conservative website with strong ties to the Republican establishment. Hillary Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee continued funding Fusion's work after the original GOP source lost interest.

The Gallup Daily survey numbers are worse than those reported Sunday in a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll that showed 38 percent of 900 adults surveyed approve of the job Trump is doing, while 58 disapprove of his job performance. Of those who disapproved of the job the president is doing, 49 percent said they strongly disapproved.

The same poll showed in September that 43 percent of Americans gave Trump a favorable approval rating, compared to 52 percent who gave him an unfavorable rating. Trump’s highest approval ratings in the NBC/WSJ poll were in the weeks following his inauguration, when 44 percent said they approved of the job he was doing, compared to 48 percent who did not.

The latest NBC/WSJ survey, taken Oct. 23-26, has an error margin of 3.57 percent.

Sanders has discounted the president's falling poll numbers, saying the same polls that show low favorability ratings are the same ones that showed Trump would not win the White House.

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