It will be a long while before Republicans really need to worry about President Trump’s approval rating; the 2026 midterms are a long ways away. But if you were wondering if the president’s recent moves, tariffs, stock market instability, high egg prices, etc. were starting to bring down Trump’s initially high (by his past standards) approval rating… the new CNN poll indicates that yes, Americans are starting to sour on the new administration.
As markets slide and investors worry in response to Trump’s trade policies, a 56 percent majority of the public disapproves of his handling of the economy, worse than at any point during his first term in office. By contrast, the 51 percent who now say they approve of his work on immigration – headlined by stricter enforcement efforts – is 7 points higher than at any point during his first term.
Americans are closely divided over Trump’s performance so far in handling the federal budget and managing the federal government – 48 percent approve on each, with about half disapproving – while giving him lower ratings for his work on health care policy (43 percent), foreign affairs (42 percent) and tariffs (39 percent).
What do Americans want? A secure border, a thriving economy with an affordable cost of living, and security, stability and peace overseas. Nobody voted to rename the Gulf of Mexico, to annex Canada, or for a Secretary of Health and Human Services who touts how measles infections are more protective than the vaccine. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Sean Hannity last night, “it used to be, when I were a kid, that everybody got measles. And the measles gave you lifetime protection against measles infection. The vaccine doesn’t do that. The vaccine is effective for some people for life, but for many people it wanes.” (Yes, and in the pre-vaccine days, measles killed a bunch more people.)
As for Elon Musk and DOGE…
Just 35 percent of Americans express a positive view of Musk, with 53 percent rating him negatively and 11 percent offering no opinion – making him both better known and more substantially unpopular than Vice President JD Vance (whom 33 percent of Americans rate favorably and 44 percent unfavorably, with 23 percent having no opinion.) Roughly 6 in 10 Americans say that Musk has neither the right experience nor the right judgment to make changes to the way the government works. There is uneasiness about Musk even among some of the president’s supporters: 28percent of those who see Trump’s changes to the government as necessary doubt the tech billionaire has the judgment to carry them out.
I suspect Americans like the idea of DOGE in theory but are wary of the execution so far; I don’t care how enthusiastic about budget-cutting you are, you shouldn’t accidentally cancel Ebola monitoring in Uganda. We’re five years past the week the world shut down because of Covid; why would the U.S. government cut the funding for airport monitoring of communicable diseases? We just lived through this!
The latest inflation numbers are pretty good, and as of this writing, the stock market is rebounding some on that news.