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
