White House report card: Less than one-third of Americans are proud that Trump is president

A poll saying only a third of Americans are "proud" of the president tells you a lot more about how the question was asked than about how the country actually feels. Pride is a mushy word. Ask people if they think Trump made the right call holding off on strikes against Iran after promising fireworks, and you'd get a very different number than asking them to perform an emotional gesture for a pollster. Those are not the same question, and anyone who's spent time around actual voters knows it.

What's more interesting than the topline number is the pattern underneath it. A president who campaigned on ending forever wars looked, for one week, like he might start one, then didn't. That's not a scandal. That's the job working as advertised, messy as it looked in real time. Restraint rarely polls well in the moment. It's the kind of decision that looks smart in six months and looks like waffling on a Tuesday news cycle.

We'd take a president willing to eat a bad news cycle over one chasing a good one by dragging the country into a war nobody asked for. If "proud" is the metric, fine, but pride is downstream of results, and results take longer than a week to show up in a poll. Judge the Iran decision in a year, not in a Friday roundup with a Democratic strategist grading the homework.