President Trump’s job approval rating has fallen steadily during his first three months in office, according to a New York Times average of polling.
Mr. Trump’s approval rating has sunk to about 45 percent, down from 52 percent one week after he took office. Around half of the country now disapproves of his performance, the polling shows.
American presidents typically enter office with a groundswell of support that wanes over time. But Mr. Trump’s approval has been dropping slightly faster than that of his predecessors.
Mr. Trump started his term with the second-lowest approval rating for a president in modern history. The only recent president to have started in a worse position was Mr. Trump the first time he took office.
The polling average, assembled by The New York Times, includes nearly all publicly released polls that track Mr. Trump’s approval rating. The goal of a polling average is to balance the biases of individual polls, which can vary in quality and frequency, and to make it easier to track changes in public opinion over time.
The average does not directly address the causes of the decline in approval, or whether they are driven by specific actions like his enactment of tariffs, his threats toward allies or gyrations in the markets.
On average, across all polls, Mr. Trump’s numbers continued to fall after he issued sweeping global tariffs by executive order. Though few high-quality polls have been conducted before and after the tariff announcement, most showed no major decline after what Mr. Trump called “Liberation Day.”
It is still too early to fully capture how an event like that has shaped public opinion.
In his second term, Mr. Trump has sought to reshape the global economy, crack down on immigration, shrink the federal government and overhaul American law firms and universities. The blitz is part of a “flood the zone” strategy devised by Mr. Trump’s aides and allies to overwhelm any opposition.
Mr. Trump is following through on many of the promises he made as a candidate, but even some supporters have registered concerns about some of his actions. In particular, the sweeping tariffs on dozens of countries have rankled allies and adversaries. The trade war plunged global economic markets into turmoil, before Mr. Trump paused the tariffs for 90 days, citing talks with other countries about new trade deals.
Polls show little drop in his support among Republican voters.
Much of the decline in approval has come from voters who identify as independent, according to Quinnipiac University polling. His standing with that crucial voting bloc in January stood at 41 percent approval and 46 percent disapproval. In Quinnipiac’s mid-April poll, 58 percent of independents said they disapproved of the president’s job performance, while just 36 percent approved.
Pollsters still struggle to fully gauge the strength of Mr. Trump’s support. In 2024, pre-election polls underestimated Mr. Trump on average by around 3 percentage points. But even the polls that most accurately assessed his support, such as AtlasIntel, now show net negative approval ratings.
Mr. Trump sees his second term as a resounding success. He has bragged about a significant drop in illegal border crossings, billions of dollars in new U.S.-based investments, the release of Americans imprisoned abroad and rooting out diversity initiatives in the public and private sectors.
Mr. Trump has also promised that new trade deals, including with China, are on the horizon.
“We’re going to be making money with everyone, and everyone’s going to be happy,” he told reporters outside the White House on Wednesday.
Irineo Cabreros contributed data analysis.
