Trump's overall approval rating of 37 per cent in the latest survey is little different from his 36 per cent mark in July and other polling prior to the protests, although it is still lower than for his recent predecessors in the White House this early in their tenures.
The President offered a shifting series of responses to the mayhem in which James Fields, 20, an Ohio man who had reportedly espoused neo-Nazi views, allegedly slammed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, killing Heather Heyer, 32, and injuring 19 others.
After initially condemning violence "on many sides," Trump waited two days amid mounting political pressure before denouncing the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis in prepared remarks at the White House.
A day later, however, Trump reversed course and again blamed "both sides," criticising liberal-leaning counterprotesters for acting "very, very violently" during a defiant news conference at Trump Tower in New York. Those remarks provoked a widespread backlash, including the resignation of several members of two presidential business advisory councils that were promptly dissolved.
The president followed up by tweeting a defence of Confederate statues, saying their removal would be "foolish" and amounted to a revisionist attack on the history and culture of southern states after the Civil War. Trump equated George Washington and Thomas Jefferson with Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. The "Unite the Right" rally had been organised as a protest of the Charlottesville city council's decision to remove a Lee statue on public land.
A majority of self-identified Republicans - more than 6 in 10 - approve of Trump's response to the protests, according to the Post-ABC poll, while about 2 in 10 disapprove and the same share offer no opinion.
Overall, Trump maintains an 80 per cent job approval rating among Republicans, a number little changed from recent surveys. But the percentage that approves "strongly" - just about half of the GOP - is down 10 percentage points from last month.
The Post-ABC survey found that roughly 1 in 6 Americans either support the alt-right or say it is acceptable to hold white supremacist or neo-Nazi views. This subgroup splits evenly in approving and disapproving of Trump's response to protests - and approves of his overall job performance by 54 to 43 per cent.
Beyond these groups, reactions to Trump's rhetoric is far more negative. Nearly twice as many political independents disapprove as approve of his response to the protests, 55 to 28 per cent, while 84 per cent of Democrats say they disapprove.
The poll found broad disapproval of Trump's Charlottesville reaction among racial minority groups. More than 8 in 10 African Americans and nearly two-thirds of Hispanics disapprove. Among whites, 49 per cent disapprove, while 35 per cent approve.
The partisan divide extends to whether Trump's response has put neo-Nazi and white supremacist views on equal footing with opponents of these groups. Democrats say he has done this by a roughly 2 to 1 margin, while Republicans are a mirror reverse.
Independents lean narrowly toward saying Trump has put white supremacists on equal footing with their opponents, by 42 to 36 per cent.
The survey is among the first to measure support for the alt-right. Some 10 per cent of adults support the movement, including similar shares of Democrats and Republicans. While it has gained greater attention after Charlottesville protests alongside Nazi and Ku Klux Klan demonstrators, just about 4 in 10 Americans think the alt-right holds neo-Nazi or white supremacist views. About 2 in 10 say it does not, while another 4 in 10 have no opinion on the movement.
The Post-ABC poll was conducted August 16-20 among a random national sample of 1014 adults reached on cell and landline phones. The margin of sampling error for overall results is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.
