The president's approval numbers are cratering as America's cost-of-living crisis worsens

In case you haven’t noticed, Donald Trump isn’t very popular.

The president’s polling numbers have been trending downward for the past year, and they’ve been especially brutal since he decided to go to war against Iran in February. It seems like every week a new batch of polls comes out emphasizing just how vigorously Americans have been giving two thumbs down to Trump’s job performance.

The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research released a poll earlier this week putting Trump’s approval at just 33 percent. Reuters/Ipsos released one putting it at 36 percent. Earlier this month, a CNN poll found only 31 percent of Americans approved of Trump’s job performance, the lowest number across his career in politics. His numbers weren’t great before the war, either. The Pew Research Center had Trump’s approval at 37 percent in January. Gallup no longer polls for presidential approval, but in December they charted Trump’s at 36 percent, down from 47 percent at the beginning of his term. RealClearPolitics’ polling average shows such a steep rise in public disapproval of Trump and such a steep dropoff in public approval since last April that people are making memes out of it.

Tatishe Nteta, provost of political science at UMass-Amherst, which released a poll late last month putting Trump’s approval at 33 percent, explains that it’s normal for a president’s approval to decrease as their term progresses, but when they get down into the 30s, “bells start going off.” It signals they’re losing some of their own party’s support, as the nation is generally split about 40/40 along party lines, with 10-20 percent of Americans being true independents. Trump’s approval isn’t just visiting the 30s; it’s been living there for a while now, and there isn’t much to indicate public sentiment is going to turn around any time soon.

“Fundamentally, this is terrible news for President Trump,” Nteta says. “People talk about the [George W.] Bush line, being under 30 percent, and that was in the wake of an unpopular and longstanding war, a financial crisis that was second only to the Great Depression, and a widespread belief that the United States was moving in the wrong direction. So if a president is flirting with one-third support, it should be a warning sign that their domestic and foreign policies are not resonating, that there’s an inability to address core problems Americans are facing, and an issue with communication between the administration and the people.”

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The war against Iran is broadly unpopular, but the core problem Americans are facing under Trump is that everything is expensive as hell. Inflation is up, the price of gas is up, and Trump is to blame. The AP-NORC Center poll released earlier this week put Trump’s approval on the economy at 30 percent, down from 38 percent just a month ago. His approval on cost-of-living issues was even worse, at just 23 percent. UMass-Amherst’s latest poll put Trump’s approval rating on inflation at 24 percent, down nearly 10 points from where it was a year ago.

Sky-high inflation under Biden is a large part of what propelled Trump back into office, and Trump had high approval numbers in the months immediately after he took office. The downward trajectory began in earnest after he enacted his tariff agenda last spring, putting a strain on consumers while the administration essentially told everyone to stop whining. The war certainly hasn’t helped, nor has the White House’s garbled messaging about when Americans should expect things to turn around.

“This is not rocket science,” Nteta says. “If people felt like they were doing well economically, that would then be reflected in the approval ratings for the president. What [these numbers are] telling us is that the economic malaise of the country is widespread, and the power to do something about it, at least for many people, is viewed in the presidency, and he has not done the job that a number of people elected him to do.”

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Trump has been such a disaster for cost of living over the past year that a Fox News poll found that for the first time in over 15 years Americans trust Democrats on the economy more than Republicans, by a 52-48-percent margin — which is really saying something just over a year removed from Biden.

The same Fox News poll found that a majority of Americans don’t think Trump has the mental soundness to effectively serve as president, which probably isn’t a very good sign for the country considering he will soon be 80 and has nearly three years left in office.

It’s unclear to what degree Trump realizes he is in trouble with the populace.

He has at times raged at “Fake and Fraudulent” polling, at times seemed puzzled that he could be so unpopular despite having the greatest first year of any president in American history, and at times insisted that in fact he is more popular than ever. Earlier this month, he responded to a question about his tanking poll numbers by touting an NBC News poll that showed 100 percent support among MAGA respondents. “A very important poll,” the president said. Trump also shared a poll on his Truth Social page showing enormous support for his military and tariff agendas, but didn’t care to include that the poll was conducted at the Conservative Political Action Conference.

Trump’s support among the right is not what he thinks it is, though. Several prominent conservative commentators have very publicly turned on him, and so too has a chunk of conservative America. The AP-NORC Center poll found that just 68 percent of Republicans approve of the job he’s been doing as president, and that the good will is even worse when it comes to cost-of-living issues, where he barely has majority support from his own party (51 percent).

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Americans will presumably be able to voice their displeasure at the ballot box in November. Democrats have been cleaning up in off-cycle races since Trump retook office, and all signs point to the party taking back control of the House of Representatives. The Cook Political Report found this week that Democrats lead by six points in the battleground districts that will determine the House. Nteta says UMass-Amherst polling has shown a sizable gap in enthusiasm about voting in the midterms between Democrats and Republicans. “Enthusiasm is the thing that usually puts individuals over the top, or puts parties over the top,” he says, “and what we are seeing now is likely that Democrats coalescing and recognizing the opportunity to potentially have a check on the president’s power if they can take control of the House and potentially even the Senate.”

The Senate may feel like a long-shot for Democrats, but everything is in play considering Trump’s historic unpopularity, and the possibility that his approval ratings could sink even lower as he continues to focus on frivolous vanity projects rather than the welfare of the American people.