The consent of the governed has been withdrawn
One year into his second term, Trump has suffered the largest approval collapse of any modern president (except the one who resigned in disgrace). He is underwater on every major policy area.
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One year ago this week, Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th President of the United States. He entered office with a net approval rating of +5 in the FiftyPlusOne.news approval rating aggregate. Despite a tumultuous first term — which ended with the president posting his worst-ever numbers after the January 6 insurrection — voters, it seemed, were willing to give him another shot.
They are no longer willing to give him that chance. Trump sits at an -16 net job approval on average today, down from +5 on his first day in office. His 21-point drop is the worst first-year performance, in the eyes of public opinion, of any president’s first term going back to at least 1948. If you compare the last year to other second-term presidencies, Trump’s is still the worst first-year performance of any president in the modern polling, with one exception: Richard Nixon (who was consumed by Watergate and other national crises at this point in his term).
Either way, Trump is in historically bad company.
As The New York Times reported this week, Trump’s support among key groups he persuaded to vote for him in 2024 — notably, young, Black, and Latino voters — has now sunk below levels measured in the run-up to the 2020 election (which Trump lost to Joe Biden by 4.5 points in the national popular vote):
The president has lost the most ground among the groups that put him back in the White House.
This week’s Chart of the Week: Trump’s historic approval collapse, in context.
I. The worst-rated president ever, except for Watergate-era Nixon
In absolute terms, a -16 approval rating is bad — but to understand how bad that is, you have to put it in historical perspective. Treating Trump, for now, as a first-term president, you can see he is matched at his low rating only by himself in 2017:
If you want to treat Trump as a second-term president, use the graph below. I calculated the net approval ratings for every second-term president since Dwight Eisenhower at their inauguration and one year later.
Among the seven presidents who won a second term, only Nixon experienced a larger drop in his first year back. Nixon fell 54 net approval points as the Watergate scandal unraveled — from +24 at his 1973 inauguration to -30 a year later. He would resign about seven months after that.
Trump’s 21-point decline puts him in second place on this list, worse than:
George W. Bush (2005): Started at +5, ended year one at -11. A 16-point drop as Iraq deteriorated and Hurricane Katrina exposed administration incompetence.
Barack Obama (2013): Started at +9, ended at -11. A 19-point drop amid the botched Obamacare rollout.
Dwight Eisenhower (1957): Started at +60, ended at +32. A 28-point drop, though he remained popular in absolute terms.
What makes Trump’s collapse notable is not just its magnitude (we have known the man was unpopular for the better part of a decade now!) but its trajectory. While it is the historical trend, presidents are not destined to get more unpopular as time goes on. Reagan and Clinton actually improved their standing in year one of their second terms — Reagan gained 6 points, Clinton gained 2. Trump moved in the opposite direction, and he started from a much weaker position than either of them.
II. Bad priorities, unpopular policies
Trump’s numbers are historically bad because he is focusing on the wrong problems and enacting unpopular policies. As I noted on Sunday, the polls show voters think he is focused on the wrong issues, and he is paying a steep price for bad prioritization.
Last week, CNN and SSRS reported that just 36% of adults think Trump has the right priorities, down from 45% when he took office. 64% of Americans said he wasn’t focusing enough on high prices — something 74% agreed with in a separate poll from CBS News and YouGov.
But even where he has focused his attention, voters don’t like the policies Trump is giving them. According to my average, Trump’s approval on the economy collapsed from +10 at inauguration to -15 today — a 26-point swing. On inflation, the drop was even steeper: from +6 to -24, a decline of 31 points. Even immigration — supposedly Trump’s signature strength — went from +9 to -7.
But even on immigration/deportations and tariffs, where voters think Trump has spent too much energy, people still don’t like what they’re getting! Trump’s immigration approval just hit a new all-time low in my average, and his approval on handling deportations is approaching the low levels from last summer. Voters are now balking at the administration’s use of force in immigration enforcement, and left-leaning policies like abolishing ICE are more popular than they’ve ever been.
On health care, voters are similarly disapproving of Trump. His approval rating on health care has slid to -12, driven by concerns over Obamacare cuts and continually rising hospital costs On trade, tariffs that were supposed to bring back manufacturing jobs have instead led to 73,000 job losses and raised prices on everyday goods. Because he has retreated somewhat from these tariffs, Trump has recovered from a -20 rating on trade last May to -15 today. But that’s still down almost 30 points from the start of his administration.
On foreign policy, Trump is at -10 today, also down 20 points from the start of his administration. And his recent actions will likely move the needle more against him. A January Economist/YouGov poll found just 9% of Americans support the U.S. “using military force to take control of Greenland.” Nine percent. For context, roughly the same share of Americans believe the moon landing was faked.
It is really hard to find anything good for Trump in these numbers. The pattern is consistent across every issue: voters asked Trump to lower prices and secure the U.S. border, and instead he’s made prices worse and enacted a much more ambitious deportations agenda than the one sanctioned by voters. Elsewhere, he has ignored voters entirely in order to pursue pet projects that nobody asked for, and to enrich himself at taxpayers’ expense.
III. Why it matters that Trump is unpopular
There’s a tendency online to suggest that Trump doesn’t care about public opinion, so why does any of this matter? For one thing, I’m not so sure he doesn’t care what the public thinks. The president routinely highlights polls when they favor him (rarely) and — more often — simply makes up numbers to pretend Americans agree with his actions. A man who didn’t care about public opinion wouldn’t spend so much energy lying about it. The lady doth protest too much, methinks.
But even if Trump were genuinely indifferent to the polls, we should not be. The Framers designed our political system on the radical idea that the government derives its “just powers from the consent of the governed.” Jefferson wrote those words in 1776, and they remain the bedrock of our country’s democratic legitimacy. Public opinion polling is how we measure that consent — and, as I argued in my book, the people who watch the polls have the responsibility to act as a pipeline from the governed to the government, giving citizens influence they would otherwise lack.
The Framers understood this tension between executive power and public accountability, which is why they designed a system of checks against it.
Making this more relevant to Trump now: The Framers were also very worried about executive overreach, thus their design of a government with separate branches sharing powers. In Federalist No. 70, Hamilton argued that a single executive would be “more narrowly watched and more readily suspected” by citizens than a diffuse council — accountability was the safeguard against tyranny. Madison put it more starkly in Federalist No. 47: “The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive, and judiciary in the same hands... may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.” They made elections to Congress more frequent than presidential elections so the legislature could check an out-of-control executive.
Looking back on a year of Trump 2.0, what we see is a president acting against the wishes of the governed at nearly every opportunity. That gap between what Trump does and what Americans want is the central question at the heart of our democracy. When leaders govern against the clear preferences of the people, repeatedly and with great cost to the average American, the social contract is violated.
When presidents roundly position themselves on the wrong side of 60-40 and 70-30 issues, they usually suffer in the form of lost political capital and electoral defeat. Trump knows what he’s doing has cost him, that’s why he’s “making jokes” about canceling the midterms. He knows if an election were held today, his party would lose.
In 2024, facing serious affordability problems (and buying a lot of misinformation about Trump’s first term and Biden/Harris’s record), Americans gave Trump another chance to fix their problems. The numbers show they now regret that choice. In the eyes of the voters, Trump 2.0 has been a failure. And while that might not matter to him, it should matter to us.
UPDATE: More to my point that Trump knows he’s losing the public:
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Tolerance is winning in the polls. Intolerance is losing. Americans don't like bullies. That's the message.
Excellent column. It not only does the usual deep dive into what the numbers say but also spends a lot of time on the “so what”—insights into why the numbers matter. Thanks for writing this so clearly.