The Trump Slump

The polls spell deep trouble for the administration 100 days in.

It’s traditional for news media and pollsters to assess the state of the presidency around 100 days. We’re nearing that number, and for Trump, the news is really, really bad.

According to a Fox News poll—which even the White House can’t explain away as liberal media bias—Trump has the lowest approval rating of any president at this time, at just 44 percent. That’s down from 49 percent in March.

The only president who came close to this number at this point in their term was Trump 1.0 at 45 percent.

These poor numbers align with a Pew poll out yesterday. That survey found Trump with just a 40 percent approval rating, tied with Trump 1.0 for lowest approval rating of any president at this point.

The New York Times average of polls also shows a steep decline, with Trump now at 45 percent approval and 52 percent disapproval. The direction of the two lines has been fairly consistent since he took office.

In many ways these numbers are not surprising. Voters who didn’t like Trump before, but somehow either forgot or were willing to give him another try, are having a strong case of buyer’s remorse. This is especially true now that they are getting a much worse version of Trump than they expected. It’s the one where all the adults in the room are nowhere to be found, and he’s surrounded himself with fawning sycophants and talking heads with no knowledge or experience in government. As a result, every day brings new chaos and scandal.

Former top aides and advisors, who implored voters not to support Trump, told us this would happen. Without anyone around to guide it safely to harbor, Trump’s ship is adrift and taking on water fast.

Moreover, voters who wanted a “CEO” president who would herald a new age of economic prosperity, as Trump had promised again and again, are instead witnessing the same capricious, vindictive, incompetent man who managed to bankrupt his own casinos.

Today, let’s take a closer look at how voters view the two major issues that Trump was supposed to be strong on: the economy and immigration. If he can’t win voters over on these, he’s unlikely to salvage his popularity before the midterm elections. And that carries enormous consequences for the GOP’s agenda.

Empty shelves from empty fables

Once you dive deeper into the numbers, the Fox poll has some even worse news for Trump. On the question of his economic performance as president, Trump now sees 56 percent of those polled disapproving with only 38 percent approving.

Note how in March his approval numbers on the economy were five points higher, even while his disapprovals didn’t shift. Those once approving voters are now uncertain as markets have gone into free fall, federal workers face mass layoffs, and there are reports of empty cargo vessels from China due to sky high tariffs.

Watch for the disapproval numbers to rise even further. Currently, these poor numbers are piling up as voters merely anticipate a weaker economy with higher inflation. It’s a bit like anxiously watching a hurricane develop off the coast—but also realizing you have no idea when it will hit or how bad it will be because Trump fired all the NOAA weather forecasters.

But the actual economic impact has yet to hit. Recently, CEOs of major retailers warned Trump that there would soon be empty store shelves as Chinese-made goods dry up. This could further provoke hoarding and price gouging, just as we saw with household goods during Covid, baby formula in 2022, and eggs in 2025. But instead of being limited to a few items, we could soon see across the board shortages.

As Molson Hart, the CEO of an educational toy company, explained,

The White House has put itself and the country in a bad situation but doesn’t realize it yet.

Around April 10th China to USA trade shut down.

It takes ~30 days for containers to go from China to LA.

45 to Houston by sea, 45 to Chicago by train.

55 to New York by sea.

That means that there are no economic effects of what was done on April 10th until about May 10th.

Around then, Hart predicts, we’ll see the effects. Trucking work will dry up. Warehouses will lay workers off. It will start on the West Coast, then hit the middle of the country, then the East Coast. Even if the trade war were to end today, which hardly seems likely, Trump’s tariff hikes unleashed an economic tsunami, similar to what we saw during lockdowns, that will swamp our shipping, distribution and inventory as it heads our way.

The likely result will be a spike in inflation, like we experienced when supply chains were upended by Covid and then suddenly ramped back up.

There’s another important point. These disapproval numbers don’t take into account the other disruptions we will likely see across multiple industries due to sudden loss of inventory and supplies, from generic medications to rare earth minerals. And they don’t yet take into account other major economic consequences from Trump / Musk policies and actions, including, to name just a few,

• a recently announced restart of student loan debt collection,

• a spike in interest rates due to loss of confidence in the safety of U.S. government bonds,

• the freezing of hiring and stop work orders due to loss of billions in research funding, and

• the possibility that Social Security payments won’t arrive on time and there will be no one in the field offices to provide customer service.

It’s already too late to reverse any of the above consequences, so we will simply have to weather them. Trump has urged patience, saying that we will have to go through some pain in a “period of transition” before getting to the promised land (really, the pipe dream) of restored U.S. manufacturing and economic world dominance.

The hard truth is this: Trump will soon need to back off his tariff plans and back down from this trade war or face economic catastrophe at home and a deep global recession of his own making. But if and when he does, that will also mean that all of this chaos was for nothing, and he will suffer a blow to credibility even among ardent supporters. It’s a lose/lose situation, from which he will have to pick the least loser of a way out.

The next 100 days could demonstrate to voters how it truly is possible for a single ignorant and mercurial man to tank the world’s strongest and most successful economy, while also wrecking it for the foreseeable future in the eyes of global investors.

Voter fury, should that occur, will make the current town halls and protests seem quaint by comparison.

Lock them up?

Immigration is supposed to be Trump’s other strong suit. He campaigned promising to deport “criminals” first as part of an ambitious and terrifying mass deportation program.

But it’s not going as planned. Trump’s numbers have fallen over his immigration policies and he is now underwater on the question. A YouGov poll puts him at -5 on his handling of immigration, a sharp drop from prior weeks.

This drop occurred after his administration targeted a few hundred Central American migrants and international students, all of whom were denied due process and summarily detained or deported. There were widely circulating videos of student activists being kidnapped off the streets by ICE agents. Social media feeds filled with stories of men without criminal records being shackled and deported on planes, then shaved and humiliated in a torture prison in El Salvador, all because their tattoos caused some ICE agent somewhere to believe they were gang members.

This has galvanized opposition and drawn strong rebukes from the courts, including a 9-0 opinion from the Supreme Court. Trump’s response did him no favors. He argued recently that “we cannot give everyone a trial”—an ironic statement from a 34-time convicted felon who constantly whined about how often he had to face the courts.

Like his handling of the economy, Trump’s numbers on immigration are likely to fall further. That’s because his administration is gearing up to go after entire minority communities in order to deport up to a million people annually. His administration is building detention camps large enough to hold tens of thousands of detainees. It is not difficult to imagine the outcry when this program gets going.

Already horror stories are piling up, including harsh treatment of foreign visitors to the U.S. who have been held for weeks without recourse, and even U.S. citizens detained by ICE, again with no hearing or clear way to obtain release. As Democracy Docket reported this morning in its newsletter,

So far, dozens of U.S. citizens — including a ten-year-old Texas girl recovering from brain cancer — have been wrongly detained or threatened with deportation through President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

It’s important to understand what this will look like at a much larger scale if and when ICE agents are ordered to up their quotas to thousands of people detained daily—a necessary step if the administration is serious about deporting millions. It’s often hard to wrap our collective heads around numbers that big. But by comparison, the number of undocumented immigrants that the Department of Homeland Security seeks to move to its newly built detention centers each year is ten times the number of Japanese Americans interned during all of World War II. The program is infeasible, it is immoral, and it will prove deadly when and if they try to implement it.

It will also be a political loser. Trump has already lost the support of many of the Latino voters he bamboozled into voting for him in November. The Pew Research poll out yesterday found that 72 percent of Latinos now disapprove of Trump, with just 27 percent approving. Latinos had swung hard to the right in 2024, hoping that Trump would deliver on his economic promises with lower prices, and he even won a majority of them in key battleground states. Now, that community faces the terror of Trump’s mass deportation efforts, where it’s becoming a regular practice to detain and hold anyone who even looks like they might be undocumented.

But does Trump even care?

A common response to poll numbers when they come out, especially when they’re particularly bad, is to sigh that Trump does not care and will just keep doing what he’s doing.

That flies in the face of what we know about Trump’s obsession with ratings and polls. Trump is ignorant and lazy, but he does rather consistently respond to public sentiment, whether it’s the stock market tanking or his approval numbers cratering.

But even if we assume for argument’s sake that Trump won’t be moved by bad polling, the same cannot be said for GOP officials facing reelection. If, as predicted, his approval numbers continue to sink, the self-preservation instincts of swing district Republicans will kick in, endangering Trump’s plan to extend tax breaks to the wealthy and slash Medicaid and food assistance. Speaker Mike Johnson has only a threadbare majority in the House, and he has had to rely on Trump’s ability to strong-arm wayward Republicans into backing unpopular bills.

But if Trump’s brand turns toxic to voters, particularly in purple congressional districts, his ability to threaten the political futures of his fellow party members will diminish considerably. After all, if standing with Trump damages your reputation with constituents more than standing against him, those with any political survival skills will find a way to abandon him.

Another common question is this: Why does Trump’s support even remain as high as the mid-40s? Who the hell still supports Trump despite everything we now know?

The numbers reveal that his drop in support has come largely from a shift among independent voters. As the New York Times reported,

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.

That means Trump went from -5 among Independents in January to -22 percent by April—a stunning 17 point shift.

Meanwhile, Trump’s support among GOP voters has yet to move significantly. Some 80 percent of GOP voters still back their president. These voters are clinging to the hope that the widespread projections of economic disaster are overblown or perhaps even will not actually happen.

It is a sad fact that most GOP voters generally will not change their minds on something unless they themselves are personally negatively affected. And those deep inside the MAGA cult won’t change their views, no matter what. That likely means that there is a baseline 30-35 percent of voters that will support their guy come what may, even if we fall into recession and the store shelves are empty as the big retailers have warned.

At moments like this I like to consider one YouGov poll that assessed voter approval of things and events associated with medieval times. In that poll, the Black Plague received 9 percent support with still 17 percent uncertain, implying that’s probably the lowest we could ever expect an approval rating to fall to.

We may never drive Trump’s polls numbers down to Black Plague levels. But as a stretch goal, I think it’s a good one.