Trump has a problem: Americans increasingly think he's incompetent

Donald Trump has already set a record for being the most unpopular new president since the invention of telephone polling. But I don't think job approval is even the poll number Trump should be most worried about.

If I were him, I'd be worrying about the question the Quinnipiac University poll is asking about my leadership skills.

In a new Quinnipiac survey out today, only 42% of adults said they think Trump is a good leader, and 55% said he's not.

Trump's big thing is supposed to be leadership: He's the business guy, he hires the best people, and he knows how to shake things up in Washington and make America great again. Right?

Back in November, shortly after the election, 56% of respondents told Quinnipiac they thought Trump was a good leader, and only 38% said he wasn't. That's not too shabby for a guy who didn't even get the most votes.

But as Trump started actually doing stuff - running a transition, hiring people, issuing half-baked executive orders, firing his national security adviser after less than a month - the share of Americans willing to call him a good leader has steadily declined.

From 56% in November, it went to 49% in January, 47% earlier this month - and now 42%, or about 4 points less than his share of the popular vote.

In polling, you often analyze a question by measuring the difference between the share of respondents who give the positive answer and the share who give the negative one. By this measure, Trump was at plus-18 on the "good leader" question in November, and now he's at minus-13, a decline of 31 points in three months.

His term runs another 51 months.

(Quinnipiac surveyed 1,323 adults in English and Spanish from February 16 to 21, with a margin of error of 2.7 percentage points.)

This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.