Trump Approval at Historic Lows
Only Nixon has been lower.
G. Elliot Morris observes that President Trump’s approval ratings are “higher only than Richard Nixon’s after Watergate and tied with confidence in George W Bush after Katrina.”*
Donald Trump’s approval rating hit a new low this week. As of April 2, the FiftyPlusOne average puts his net approval at -21.4 — 37.2% approve, 58.6% disapprove. That’s the lowest mark of his second term.
How bad is -21.4? When compared to past presidents, Trump’s ratings are the lowest of any president at this point in their term, going back to FDR. The spaghetti chart below lines up every president’s net approval by time in office. Trump’s red line is all the way at the bottom. Fourteen months in, no one else was this far underwater. Only Joe Biden, at the beginning of the 2022-23 inflation crisis, was close — and Trump is outrunning him by about 10 points:
If you treat Trump as a second-term president, his rating today is higher only than Richard Nixon’s after Watergate and tied with confidence in George W Bush after Katrina a worsening war in Iraq:
What’s striking about Trump is that he’s reached basically the same place without one singular catastrophe doing all the damage. Instead, he has accumulated several negative shocks to his presidency, including fallout from his tariffs, mass deportations, the Oct. 2025 government shutdown, and an unpopular war. None of them alone ended his presidency, but together, they’ve dragged him down to the same territory that ended other presidents’.
The rest of the article, which is quite extensive, details the effects all of those have had. But to me, the top line—the disastrously low rating itself—is the key takeaway. And getting bogged down in a war of his own choosing, which had the predictable side effect of drastically increasing gas prices (and, soon, the prices of all the products made with and transported by petroleum) is surely going to push them further downward.
*Hat tip: Laura Rozen
His prospects for improvement don’t look good. His best-case scenario for the war is to declare victory and go home, leaving the same regime in power and without having secured the uranium. The regime will be more extreme and militant, and they will almost certainly assert far more power over the Strait of Hormuz than they had previously.
Trump and Hegseth will brag about how much they blew up, and a lot of his followers will believe it, but the world will know what a humiliating mistake it all was.
Meanwhile, gas prices will continue upward as the disruption to the global market will not vanish overnight, if at all, and inflation in other areas will occur alongside all the other problems of a massive supply-chain disruption.
In the midst of all of that, Trump will still be asking for more defense funding, all the while telling the population we can’t afford social programs.
And again, I think that is the best-case scenario.
Heckuva job, indeed.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I agree at what the best case is – pick up the marbles and go home, but it is still a disaster. It would leave Iran operating the Strait as a toll booth with a diminished number of ships allowed to pass.
CNBC reported that Iran would discuss the Strait with Oman, but only after combat operations end.
@charontwo: Indeed.
This idiocy has multiple causes, but ironically there’s reporting that one push was Jared telling Trump he’d get a rally-round-the-flag polling bump for the midterms. Dumb.
Sadly, until his unpopularity drags down his GOP supplicant enablers and his oligarch funders, the country will still suffer. Trump won’t change behavior based on polling he has convinced himself is fake.
November is a long time from now in Trump Dumpster Time.
Such negative coverage.
Why not be positive instead? el taco has the highest disapproval rating ever! In fact, no one had ever been disapproved of this much! It’s a great achievement!!11!!