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Donald Trump came into office in 2025 with something he NEVER had in his first term as president: A majority of Americans approving of him.
Now, to be clear, Trump wasn’t at 65% approval in January. He was in the low 50s. But, for a man who never once broke 50% approval in Gallup polling between 2017 and 2021, it was striking to see that Trump 2.0 was off on a more popular foot.
That is all gone now. Just 6 days shy of his 100th day in office, Trump finds himself in almost the exact same spot, polling-wise, that he was eight years ago. And that, my friends, is not a good spot.
A Pew poll out this week put Trump’s job approval at 40%. Know what Trump’s approval rating was in Pew’s 100 days poll in 2017? Yup! 40%.
And it’s not just Pew. Look at this chart — via
— on polling averages for modern-presidents over their first 100-ish days in office:
Those two Trump lines are starting to get VERY close together.
What’s the point? This: Trump did have a stronger level of good will and support in 2025 than when he came to the presidency in 2017. He appears to have entirely squandered it in the space of less than 100 days.
How? By focusing on tariffs and implementing them in a haphazard and poorly-explained way. Those moves have driven down the stock market and driven up overall uncertainty about the strength of the economy. Trump was expressly elected to lower prices and reduce inflation. He has taken his eye off that ball — and it has cost him.
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