Trump Approval Rating Looks Fragile at Start of Second Term

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images

One of the great anomalies of American politics is that Donald Trump, who has been elected to the presidency twice and came very close to victory a third time, has been pretty regularly unpopular since he first came down that New York escalator in 2015. The day he was elected in 2016, his personal net favorability ratio per FiveThirtyEight was minus 24 percent, lower than any major-party presidential nominee dating back at least to the 1970s. For a moment during his first term as president, he had a positive job-approval ratio, but it went south by February 3, 2017, and never recovered. On Election Day 2020, his job-approval numbers were 44.6 percent positive, 52.6 percent negative. And he left office after the January 6 Capitol Riot with a 38.6 percent/57.9 percent ratio.

During his comeback effort, Trump’s favorability ratio was never positive. His favorability number peaked at 44 percent on February 28, 2024, and luckily for him, it was still at 43.6 percent — not good, but not disastrous — on Election Day.

All of this makes the 47th president’s current standing look pretty good. His current job-approval average is 49.1 percent positive and 43.9 percent negative, down very slightly from where he was on Inauguration Day. But individual polls can give you a different impression of where he stands. Gallup’s January 2025 job-approval poll shows Trump at 47 percent positive, 48 percent negative, so unsurprisingly, its current take is that the glass is half-empty:

At 47%, President Donald Trump’s initial job approval rating for his second term is similar to the inaugural 45% reading during his first term, again placing him below all other elected presidents dating back to 1953. Trump remains the only elected president with sub-50% initial approval ratings.

It’s worth noting as well that Trump’s personal favorability, despite the inaugural “honeymoon” he is supposedly experiencing, remains meh at best: he’s at 46.4 favorable, 48.0 unfavorable, per FiveThirtyEight.

It’s also pretty clear that Trump is not as popular as Joe Biden was at this point in the 46th presidency: On January 31, 2021, Biden’s job-approval average was 53.8 percent positive and 33.4 percent negative. His approval ratio eventually turned negative in September 2021 and remained underwater until he left office.

All this is relevant background for what we might expect now that Trump 2.0 is entering its first serious rough patch, with a significant public backlash against a poorly executed and almost immediately suspended federal funding freeze. Upcoming fights over congressional budget decisions (which could make the funding-freeze furor seem like a low-pressure dress rehearsal), the messy details of mass deportation, and Trump’s own tendency to overreach could all drive his popularity down to where it has been for most of his public career. The question then remains: In his last term in office, does he really care?