Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images
Eight years ago, Donald Trump was a controversial new president whose election via an inside straight in the Electoral College was widely considered a startling surprise, maybe even to himself. Despite inheriting a steadily growing economy with virtually no inflation, after 100 days in office he posted by far the lowest approval rating of any new president at that stage of his tenure dating back to the Eisenhower administration — indeed, the only one who wasn’t over 50 percent in what was usually a “honeymoon” of public opinion. He was also well on his way to a poor midterm performance by his party and eventually a reelection defeat (albeit one he never accepted).
As we approach the 100-day mark in 2025, Trump is rapidly becoming as unpopular as he was at this point in 2017, despite winning the national popular vote and sweeping all seven swing states in November. As Silver Bulletin explained on April 27:
After little movement between April 9th and 21st, Donald Trump’s approval ratings are now falling rapidly. His net approval just hit -9.1 in the Silver Bulletin average. That’s the first time it’s broken -9 during his second term. And it’s only 0.3 percentage points better than Trump’s net approval rating at this point in his first term.
In fact, Trump’s disapproval rating is now higher than it was at this point in his first term. On day 98 of term one, 51.8 percent of Americans disapproved of Donald Trump. Today — 98 days into term two — 53.2 percent of Americans disapprove.
The trend lines don’t look good, moreover. We now have our first 2025 poll, from AP-NORC, showing Trump’s approval rating dropping into the 30s (39 percent approval to 59 percent disapproval). Trump’s net approval rating (per Silver Bulletin) has slid from minus-2.6 percent to minus-9.1 percent in the month of April. But it didn’t just go south in April: On the day of his second inauguration, Trump’s net approval rating was plus-11.6 percent. So it has dropped 20.7 percent in the first 100 days of his second term. As the New York Times public-opinion analyst Nate Cohn put it, “It’s not easy to burn this much good will so fast.”
Trump’s own reaction, of course, has been to attack pollsters, as in this April 28 post on Truth Social, shortly after the first national polls of 2025 from Times-Siena and ABC–Washington Post dropped, showing the president’s net approval rating (respectively) at minus-12 and minus-13 percent, right on the heels of a Fox News poll placing his net approval at minus-11 percent:
These people should be investigated for ELECTION FRAUD, and add in the FoxNews Pollster while you’re at it. They are Negative Criminals who apologize to their subscribers and readers after I WIN ELECTIONS BIG, much bigger than their polls showed I would win, loose a lot of credibility, and then go on cheating and lying for the next cycle, only worse. They suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, and there is nothing that anyone, or anything, can do about it.
The reality is that Times-Siena (whose last Donald Trump–Kamala Harris polls showed a tie) and Fox News (which had Trump ahead of Harris by 2 percent) pretty much nailed the 2024 results, and all the major forecasting outlets showed a dead heat in the battleground states (the Times, for example, had Trump leading in four of seven and trailing only by a single point in the other three, which was very close to the final results). The only “derangement” stems from Trump’s incredibly persistent claims that his extremely narrow 2024 win was, in fact, a historic landslide. So, of course, it’s hard for him to acknowledge that even wildly Trump-friendly polling outlets like Rasmussen Reports now show his job-approval ratings underwater.
What’s more remarkable than the general slide in Trump’s job-approval numbers is the dip’s pervasiveness across issue areas, including those on which the president was in a very strong position coming out of the 2024 elections. In the most recent (April 22) Economist-YouGov poll, Trump’s net approval in the eight issue areas explored was all negative. The same was true in seven issue areas assessed by the new Times-Siena and ABC-WaPo surveys.
Given the extraordinary publicity the administration is giving to the first stages of its mass-deportation initiative, it’s significant that Trump’s approval rating on his very best issue, immigration, is deteriorating everywhere you look. He was underwater in approval on immigration in recent polls from Fox News, Pew Research, Reuters-Ipsos, Quinnipiac, Economist-YouGov, ABC-WaPo-Ipsos, and Times-Siena. As recently as last month, Economist-YouGov gave him a plus-13 percent net approval rating on immigration. And limited polling on Trump’s handling of the Kilmar Abrego Garcia dispute shows very little if any public-opinion runway for further defiance of federal-court orders.
Trump’s 2024 victory depended heavily on perceptions that he had handled the economy and the cost of living well in his first term and would do so again in his second term. Therefore, his rapidly eroding job-approval numbers on both of those issues could be especially significant. That’s particularly true if the widely anticipated consumer-price impact of his very unpopular tariff program comes to pass. A good indicator of the general public feeling about the Trump 2.0 economy comes from the relatively positive AtlasIntel poll in mid-April, which gave respondents the options of rating Trump’s performance in this area as “excellent,” “good,” “regular,” “poor,” or “terrible.” Fifty-five percent chose “terrible.” Majorities in the latest CBS News and Fox News surveys said Trump has made the economy worse than it was before he took office, and a comprehensive poll of economic issues by CNBC showed that half of respondents expect the economy to get worse. Americans routinely oppose the administration’s tariff initiatives (obviously a moving target), and shocking majorities expect prices to rise, which could be a popularity killer. The latest AP-NORC survey is typical: “Roughly half of U.S. adults say that Trump’s trade policies will increase prices ‘a lot’ and another 3 in 10 think prices could go up ‘somewhat.’”
Who’s souring on Trump? Mostly independents. Indeed, one of the reasons Trump’s falling approval ratings is significant is that there is very little movement among self-identified Democrats and Republicans (though the latter are showing some disloyalty to the Boss on tariffs), so it’s taking a big shift among the most persuadable swing voters to produce his bad numbers. And it’s not just a shift from positive to negative views about Trump; it’s also the intensity of these feelings. The latest Times-Siena poll asks for an overall assessment of Trump’s second term so far. Among independents, 4 percent were “very positive,” 16 percent were “positive,” 24 percent were “negative,” and 40 percent were “very negative.” In the new ABC-WaPo survey, 42 percent of independents “disapprove strongly” of Trump’s job performance. Indie disapproval is at 56 percent on immigration, 60 percent on “managing the federal government,” 66 percent on the economy and on foreign policy, and 70 percent on tariffs. Trump won in 2024 to a significant degree by expanding his party’s coalition. He’s unraveling it after 100 days.
