Six in ten Americans now disapprove of the job that President Donald Trump is doing, his lowest rating since a violent mob of his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
A new Washington Post/Ipsos poll, taken from February 12-17, found that 58 percent of registered voters, and 60 percent of Americans overall, said Trump is managing the presidency poorly. Some 50 percent of Americans “strongly” disapprove of his job performance.
The president continues to lose ground on two of his flagship issues – immigration and the economy – amid a nationwide mass deportation campaign and persistent high consumer prices.
Trump’s efforts to convince Americans that inflationary pressures either don’t exist or are easing quickly have not paid off so far. Some 65 percent of Americans say the president is doing a bad job of bringing prices down, according to the poll.
Large numbers of Americans also oppose Trump’s global tariffs. In the latest survey, 64 percent of Americans opposed the strategy – a number that has barely budged since the beginning of his term. On Friday, the Supreme Court ruled against large parts of Trump’s tariff agenda as illegal.
One of the highest disapproval ratings in the poll – 58 percent – was on Trump’s handling of immigration. His administration has surged ICE agents into some American cities to engage in sweeping deportation arrests. In Minneapolis, this has led to violent clashes with protesters and the fatal shootings of two Americans, Alex Pretti and Renee Good, by ICE agents this winter.
The only time Trump has faced a worse disapproval rating on this issue, in a Post/Ipsos poll, was September 2017, days after he rescinded the DACA program (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) that shielded immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as young children from deportation.
The president received low marks on his ability to maintain the U.S.’s relationships with foreign allies. His disapproval rating is 62 percent amid trade disputes with Canada, tussles with NATO over Greenland, and a potential military attack on Iran.
Republicans are stumbling towards what increasingly is shaping up to be a bloody midterm season, fueled in part by a Senate map that has suddenly turned unfavorable for them and a clear Democratic advantage on a generic ballot that has frontline district GOP members sweating. A wave of retirements has also shrunk the GOP’s majority in the House to the low single digits while compounding their efforts to protect the majority in the Senate, too.
The Post/Ipsos survey suggests that while Trump’s numbers on the economy have slightly recovered in recent months, his overall unpopularity remains a problem for the GOP and could easily drag down his party’s numbers in November should they not improve in the coming months.
Data from the Post/Ipsos survey was collected from a population sample of 2,589 U.S. adults between Feb. 12-17, with a margin of error of +/- two percentage points. The sample of registered voters included responses from 2,087 voters with a margin of error of +/- 2.2 percentage points.
