G. Elliott Morris analyzes Trump’s polling in light of the events that have sent his numbers tumbling:
The first drop was by far the sharpest. In the couple of weeks after Trump took office and started signing a barrage of executive orders, his net approval cratered at a pace of about 15 points per month. That was the fastest decline of his whole presidency — basically, whatever political “honeymoon” Trump enjoyed after his 2024 victory collapsed almost immediately.
From early February through early April 2025, that decline slowed to around 2 points per month. Then came his “Liberation Day” tariffs announcement, a year ago as of this Thursday, April 2, and the press coverage around the Kilmar Abrego Garcia deportation. That caused Trump’s approval to drop another 5 points in just a month.
After that, things eased off a bit more. The National Guard deployment to Los Angeles in June 2025 coincided with a slower rate of decline, closer to 2 points per month. And from June through October, Trump’s numbers were almost flat, falling by less than a point a month. If there was ever a moment when things looked like they might be leveling off, that was it.
But it didn’t last. The government shutdown and the No Kings protests in October 2025 pushed the trend downward again, roughly doubling the pace of decline. The president lost support after the 2025 statewide elections across the country, then recovered a couple of points of ground.
The trend snapped back to the negative with the first round of the Epstein files release in December. And now the war with Iran has sped things up again, with Trump’s net approval falling at about 2 points per month again — the fastest sustained slide since spring 2025.
Surprisingly, one set of events the model doesn’t pick up is the murder of Nicole Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis in January. There looks to be a slight decline in Trump’s rating after these events, but the model does not pick it up as a “change point” — maybe because of the noise in the trend in early Feb. This is good point to stop and remind ourselves that analyzing aggregatge trends in observational polling data often leaves information on the table and cannot provide for causal analysis. For example, there was a big dip in Trump’s immigration issue approval after Good and Pretti were killed, suggesting it did break through to the average American when they thought about immigration in particular, even if there wasn’t an obvious hit to Trump’s overall rating.
And now there’s Iran…
Morris says that this is mostly attributed to economic anxiety and a strong majority is holding his responsible for it. But every once in a while something else breaks through that send his rating even lower. He is on a negative trajectory and nothing seems to change it. And as Morris notes, Trump doesn’t appear to give a damn about it.
As I have written, he’s playing for history and believes that he will end up being the big winner because he has always been right about everything.