In our polarized political age, it’s rare that 70% of Americans agree on anything. But right now, 70% of Americans agree that President Donald Trump is doing a bad job on the economy, according to a new CNN poll this week.
That number isn’t just big; it was previously unthinkable. The economy was Trump’s rock during his first term, with his disapproval rating on that issue never even reaching 50% in CNN data.
The story of how he got here is one of overriding hubris and unforced errors.
And the new CNN poll makes that clearer than just about anything to date.
Trump’s numbers on handling of the economy are his worst ever: 30% approving to 70% disapproving, according to the survey. That’s a minus-40 net disapproval.
Virtually all Democrats (97%) disapprove. But so do a whopping 79% of independents and even 30% of Republicans. Trump’s disapproval on the economy is now worse than Joe Biden’s or Barack Obama’s ever were.
The poll also shows 65% of Americans say Trump’s policies “have worsened economic conditions,” and 77% say they have “increased the cost of living” in their communities.
And it’s not just that Americans are still skeptical about the economy and are suddenly blaming the incumbent president; it’s that Trump actively did things that Americans saw as exacerbating a shaky economy.
He did that mostly with his tariffs and the Iran war, which the data suggests were the turning points in how Americans viewed his handling of the economy.
The tariffs and the war coincide with the largest and third-largest increases in Trump’s economic disapproval in either of his terms, in fact.
Trump’s disapproval rating on the economy jumped from 56% in March 2025 to 61% in April 2025, after he announced his “Liberation Day” global tariffs.
And it jumped from 61% in January, before he launched strikes on Iran in late February, to 69% in March and now 70% today.
(The only other time it rose by at least 5 points between two CNN polls was in his first few months as president in 2017, when his overall numbers first got much worse.)
These two events also happened at the same time as the largest increases in the percentage of Americans who say Trump’s policies “have worsened economic conditions.” That number jumped from 51% before the tariff announcement to 59% afterward. Then it jumped from 55% shortly before the war to 65% today.
In both instances, the percentage of Republicans who said Trump was harming the economy doubled — from 10% to 22% after the tariffs announcement, and from 13% to 27% after the Iran war began.
The new CNN poll also showed Americans attached both of these issues directly to their negative views of the economy.
Fully 65% said the implementation of tariffs has had a negative effect on their personal financial situation, and 75% said the same of the Iran war. That’s in addition to the 77% that said Trump’s policies overall have increased the cost of living where they live.
And on both of those Iran findings, even a majority of Republicans agree — which is striking.
Why? Because partisans tend to avoid blaming bad developments on politicians they like. They’ll often blame economic problems on environmental factors that are outside of a president’s control, or they’ll blame the policies of the previous president for dogging the incumbent.
Trump’s problem is that he has made it near-impossible for even many Republicans to give him that benefit of the doubt.
It’s no secret why gas prices have skyrocketed over the past two and a half months: the Iran war. And before that, Trump’s tariffs gave Americans an easy culprit to blame for what became prolonged inflation, increasingly dismal jobs numbers and suboptimal economic growth.
The most telling data on this dynamic came shortly after the tariffs announcement last year.
A year into Trump’s first term, NPR-PBS-Marist College polling had showed just 40% of Americans said the current economic conditions were mostly a result of Trump’s policies, rather than something he inherited. That number never went higher than the mid-40s during Obama’s entire presidency.
But just three months into Trump’s second term, it leapt all the way up to 60%.
That was the tariffs in action. Today, the Iran war allows for drawing an even more direct line between the president’s policy and economic pain.
It’s impossible to run a counterfactual scenario, in which Trump never launches his tariffs or this war, to see how much better things might have been for him. It’s possible there could have still been stubborn inflation and other bad economic indicators that Americans would eventually have blamed on him.
But the president unilaterally took action that made things worse. He didn’t even bother to ask for buy in from the Republicans who run both chambers of Congress, despite both tariffs and war being powers the Constitution gives to the legislative branch.
And now it’s severely threatening his legacy.
