President Donald Trump repeatedly touts that America is ‘back’ as he spotlights his accomplishments – some of them controversial – since returning to power in the White House nine weeks ago.
Trump has been moving at warp speed in his second tour of duty as president, flexing his political muscles to expand executive powers as he has upended long-standing government policy and made major cuts to the federal workforce through a flurry of executive orders and actions.
Additionally, Trump has signed roughly 100 executive orders since his Jan. 20 inauguration, according to a count from Fox News, far surpassing the rate of any recent presidential predecessors during their opening weeks in office.
The president touts that ‘a lot of great things are happening,’ but the latest public opinion polling indicates that many Americans do not agree with Trump’s rosy outlook on the job he is doing in office.
Forty-five percent of those questioned in a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted this past weekend (March 21-23) gave Trump a thumbs up, with 51% saying they disapproved of his performance steering the nation. The survey questioned just over 1,000 adults nationwide.
The poll was conducted mostly before the controversy over top White House national security members discussing sensitive operational details of a U.S. military strike in Yemen, on the messaging app Signal, possibly in violation of some federal laws.
Trump’s numbers were slightly higher in the most recent Fox News national poll, which was in the field March 14-17. Americans appeared divided on the job the president was doing, with 49% approval and 51% disapproval.
An average of all the most recent national polls that asked the presidential approval question indicates that Trump’s approval ratings are just below water. Trump has seen his numbers edge down slightly since the start of his second term, when an average of his polls indicated the president’s approval rating in the low 50s and his disapproval in the mid-40s.
Contributing to the slide, the economy and jitters that Trump’s tariffs on America’s top trading partners will spark further inflation, which was a pressing issue that kept former President Joe Biden’s approval ratings well below water for most of his presidency.
The president’s 49% overall approval rating in the Fox News poll matches the all-time high for Trump in the network’s polling, which he last reached in April 2020, near the end of his first term in office. That is six points higher than where he stood at this point in his first administration (43% approval in March 2017).
Trump’s poll numbers were almost entirely in negative territory in most surveys for the entirety of his first term in office.
‘Keep these numbers in perspective. The numbers he’s averaging right now are still higher than he was at any point during his first presidency,’ veteran Republican pollster Neil Newhouse told Fox News.
Daron Shaw, who serves as a member of the Fox News Decision Team and is the Republican partner on the Fox News Poll, highlighted that ‘the difference is largely a function of the consolidation of the Republican base.’
‘The party’s completely solidified behind him,’ added Shaw, a politics professor and chair at the University of Texas, who noted that Trump’s current rock-solid GOP support was not the case at the start of the first term, when he had troubles with some Republicans.
Newhouse also emphasized that Trump’s Republican ‘base is still strongly behind him.’
It is a similar story with Trump’s popularity.
The president’s favorable ratings are slightly underwater, in an average of the latest national surveys, but they remain superior to his standing during his first term in the White House. Additionally, the percentage of Americans who say things are on the right track in the country has jumped to above 40% in a bunch of recent polls. While still in negative territory, they are the most positive right track/wrong track figures in years.
So how does Trump stack up with his immediate predecessor?
Biden came out of the game in a favorable position, with his approval rating hovering in the low- to-mid-50s during the first six months of his single term as president, with his disapproval in the upper 30s to the low- to-mid-40s.
However, Biden’s numbers sank into negative territory in the late summer and autumn of 2021, in the wake of his much-criticized handling of the turbulent U.S. exit from Afghanistan, and amid a surge of migrants crossing into the U.S. along the nation’s southern border with Mexico, as well as the rise in inflation.
Biden’s approval ratings stayed underwater throughout the rest of his presidency.
‘He just got crippled and never recovered,’ Shaw said of Biden.