President Donald Trump appears to bemore unpopular than he’s ever been– including after the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
In fact, his 35% average approval rating in theCNN Poll of Pollsmeans he’s now flirting withGeorge W. Bush territory. Bush is the only president since Jimmy Carter to spend a sustained period of time in the mid-30s or lower.
And all of it is putting the Republican Party at risk of a severe rebuke from voters in just six months’ time in the 2026 midterm elections.
It’s been a pretty gradual, steady deterioration throughout Trump’s more than 15 months back as president. But a few dynamics stand out.
The first time we saw Trump’s approval rating drop significantly was … almost instantly.
Trump came into office with his best approval ratings ever, with some polls showing him above 50% in late January 2025. But he had an extremely short honeymoon, quickly shedding several points.
It’s difficult to pin down exactly what caused the quick decline. Trump’s first days back in office were a flurry of unilateral actions.Two likely culpritswere his highly unpopular pardons of virtually all January 6 defendants, even those who assaulted police, and the haphazard Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cuts to government employees and services led by thehighly unpopular Elon Musk.
The next big juncture came in early April, when Trump truly went big on his tariffs. His “Liberation Day” announcement on April 2 effectively meant a trade war with the overwhelming majority of the world. (The Supreme Court this yearinvalidatedmany of those tariffs.)
Except Americans who had previously been tariff-curious quickly turned against them. And Trump’s average approval rating dropped from 45% when the tariffs were announced to 41% a month later.
The next six months or so were relatively stable, despite the congressional GOP passing avery unpopular Trump agenda billand the Justice Department’s mishandling of the Epstein files. But things began to slip again, and Democrats had a strong 2025 election, when they won governor’s races in both New Jersey and Virginia by wide margins.
Source: Drudge Report
