https://www.natesilver.net/p/trump-approval-ratings-nate-sil... shows me that, while a lot of people strongly disapprove of Trump, he retains a very strong base of over 40% of likely voters. And his overall approval rating is pretty typical for a US President at this point in their term.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/10/23/economy/trump-argentina-beef-...
He won last election on a fragile coalition which doesn’t exist anymore today. So, if elections are held today, he’d not only lose but will also get buried deep down.
Given the way that all media (across the spectrum) have been slipping, I will not take any story based on anecdote as indicative of anything other than the biases of the one selecting the anecdotes. Give me a poll. And the polling shows that his base is strong.
* https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/presidential... * https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-lowest-100-day-approva...
Now that was 100 days, but we are 278 days into his second term now. The polls went down further and polls on issues he should have addressed are not going up.
For a better view of what's normal and compared with presidency of the past:
* https://news.gallup.com/interactives/507569/presidential-job...
The first 6 months are usually a honey moon period. The full effect of Trump's policies are still to be felt, and with the current political / economic / legal / etc.. context, the approval ratings won't go up.
But indeed, his core is difficult to move. My opinion on what follows, but I think they attached too much of their identity to the guy and their coping mechanism will be studied for decades to come in political, psychology and history classes.
There are many different pollsters, each of which has slightly different numbers. Here are Nate Silver's average of the polls giving approval for historical presidents at this point in their office who were then polling below 50%. (Obama, at 51.8% just missed the cutoff.)
45.8% Bill Clinton
43.7% Trump (current term)
43.6% Joe Biden
39.1% Gerald Ford
38.0% Trump (first term)
So really, despite how mad so many people are, his popularity is not that low by historical standards.
I think we can. This tells his popularity is not as strong as what the claim is. We are in a presence of a significant vocal minority. I will grant that his core base is hard to move, including the farmers who are going bankrupt and harmed by his own policies, and many will rationalize it. As Twain's quote go: "It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled". Especially when voters are voting based on identity.
Equally, he could do a lot worse than his current numbers and they are not that catastrophic, granted. Comparing to Clinton who did bad in his early 1st term isn't great (for a myriad of scandals that are quite pale compared to recent times), or Biden inheriting a bad economy with a pandemic, while Trump inherited a boosting economy in his first term, and a recovering one for his second. Hence his numbers should be so much better.
Some key metrics to focus is the independants support/approval that he lost in majority, and certain pro maga communities such as the latinos who's families are directly affected. Farmers, who knows how much will swing and wake up after losing it all, but some did already. A trend might start with the economic dominoes slowly dropping.
Overall, I don't think he has normal polling numbers given the context. But we are not in normal times.