President Donald Trump appears to be more unpopular than he’s ever been – including after the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
In fact, his 35% average approval rating in the CNN Poll of Polls means he’s now flirting with George 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.
So how did we get here?
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 culprits were 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 the highly 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 year invalidated many 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 a very unpopular Trump agenda bill and 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.
The next flashpoint came in January, when Trump’s aggressive immigration crackdown culminated in federal agents killing Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. The administration quickly suggested Good and Pretti were at fault and even domestic terrorists. But Americans overwhelmingly disagreed.
Trump’s approval rating didn’t drop much, but that seems at least in part to how his administration suddenly backed off on its most aggressive tactics and changed leadership.
Which brings us to the big one right now: the Iran war, which a poll on Friday showed 61% of Americans labeled a “mistake.”
Again, Trump’s numbers haven’t exactly plummeted; he’s down from an average of 38% when the war started in late February to 35% today.
But the war has caused some of the bottom to fall out of Trump’s numbers – making people who had resolutely stood by him for years change their posture. It’s also sent his economic numbers to new lows.
The 64% of people who now disapprove of him in the CNN Poll of Polls, a rolling average of recent polls asking adults for their opinion of Trump’s handling of the presidency, is higher than virtually any single poll from his first term.
Aside from these key individual junctures, we can point to a few things.
One is hubris. Trump has governed like someone who truly believed he had the overwhelming mandate that he claimed, rather than someone who won a plurality of the popular vote.
He’s done oodles of things that were unpopular, and often predictably so. He’s taken policies that might be popular – like ramping up deportations – and gone in directions that Americans often regarded as going “too far” like the Minneapolis crackdown. And perhaps most significantly, he’s taken ownership of nearly everything by acting unilaterally.
The economy was clearly unsteady and prices were stubbornly high, for example, but Trump still decided to rock the boat with global tariffs and now the Iran war, things that Americans can now attach directly to their long-running economic discontent.
The second key dynamic is Trump hurting himself on the most important issue: cost of living.
The tariffs hurt, but the Iran war has really hurt. Gas prices spiking to over $4 per gallon have sent Trump’s economic approval rating in CNN polling to an all-time low of 31%. And his already bad numbers on the cost of living have plummeted further – to the point where most polls show 70% or more disapprove of him on that issue.
A third is just having the wrong priorities.
It’s not just that Americans don’t like what he’s done on the cost of living. It’s that they think he’s neglected the issue.
The March CNN poll showed 65% of Americans said Trump had “not gone far enough” to lower prices, and CBS News-YouGov polling has shown three-quarters of Americans say Trump has not focused enough on lowering prices.
When Trump actually does talk about the economy, he often seems bored by it. Meanwhile, Trump has pursued a series of foreign military interventions that polls showed Americans had very little interest in.
The March CNN poll showed 67% of Americans say Trump hasn’t paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems.
Lastly is a declining view of his competence and wherewithal.
A mostly strong economy in his first term (until the Covid-19 pandemic) meant that people who might not have liked him personally nonetheless saw him as an accomplished businessman who could run the country.
That’s now in doubt. Pew Research Center polling has shown sharp drops in Americans’ confidence in Trump’s ability to make the right decisions in foreign policy. And a new Pew survey Friday showed at least 60% of Americans didn’t have confidence in Trump to manage the executive branch, use military force wisely, make good foreign policy decisions or work effectively with Congress.
Concerns about Trump’s mental acuity and stability have also crept up, amid a series of verbal stumbles. One recent poll even showed 61% of Americans and even 30% of Republicans agreed that Trump has “become erratic with age.”
A midterm election is generally seen as a referendum on the president. That’s not always 100% the case – like in 2022 – but generally speaking, it holds. The more unpopular you are, the worse your side tends to do.
Some of the worst midterm elections in modern history came when presidents had approval ratings below 50%: Harry Truman in 1946 (his party lost 55 House seats), Lyndon Johnson in 1966 (48 seats), Ronald Reagan in 1982 (26 seats), Bill Clinton in 1994 (54 seats), George W. Bush in 2006 (30 seats), Barack Obama in 2010 (64 seats) and Trump in 2018 (42 seats).
On the flip side, presidents with approval ratings around 60% or higher have almost always lost fewer than 10 seats or even gained ground.
A big exception came in 2022, when Joe Biden was unpopular but the election was pretty even. But that owed in large part to the Supreme Court having recently overturned Roe v. Wade and Democrats being able to run against Trump.
