President Donald Trump has said that America is “back” while he talks about his many accomplishments, some of which have been controversial, since taking office nine weeks ago.
Through a series of executive orders and actions, Trump has quickly increased his executive powers, questioned long-standing government policies, and cut the size of the federal workforce by a large amount during his second term as president, Fox News reported.
A count from Fox News also shows that Trump has signed about 100 executive orders since his inauguration on January 20. This is a much higher rate than any recent president had in their first few weeks in office.
Even though the president says “a lot of great things are happening,” the most recent polls show that many Americans don’t agree with his optimistic view of his job.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll done this past weekend (March 22–23) found that 46% of those asked liked Trump, while 51% didn’t think he was doing a good job of leading the country. The poll asked just over 1,000 adults across the country questions.
The poll was mostly done before the controversy over top White House national security officials talking about sensitive operational details of an upcoming U.S. military strike in Yemen on the messaging app Signal, which may have been against federal law.
There were a few more votes for Trump in the most recent national poll from March 14–17 by Fox News. With 49% saying they liked the job the president was doing and 51% saying they didn’t, Americans seemed to have mixed feelings about it.
The most recent national polls, which inquired about the president’s approval ratings, reveal that Trump’s ratings remain relatively low. Since the beginning of his second term, when the average of Trump’s polls showed that the president was approved of in the low 50s and disapproved of in the mid-40s, his numbers have gone down a little.
The economy and worries that Trump’s tariffs on America’s top trading partners will cause more inflation are both factors in the drop. For the majority of his presidency, former President Joe Biden’s approval ratings were significantly impacted by this major issue.
The poll from Fox News shows that 49% of people agree with the president. This is the same level of approval that Trump had at his all-time high in Fox News polls, which he last reached in April 2020, near the end of his first term in office. This is six points more than where he was at this point in his first term (43% approval in March 2017).
Most polls showed that Trump’s approval ratings were almost always negative during his first term in office.
“Keep these numbers in perspective. The numbers he’s averaging right now are still higher than he was at any point during his first presidency,” veteran Republican pollster Neil Newhouse told Fox News.
Daron Shaw, who serves as a member of the Fox News Decision Team and is the Republican partner on the Fox News Poll, highlighted that “the difference is largely a function of the consolidation of the Republican base.”
“The party’s completely solidified behind him,” added Shaw, a politics professor and chair at the University of Texas, who noted that Trump’s current rock-solid GOP support was not the case at the start of the first term, when he had troubles with some Republicans.
It was also made clear by Newhouse that Trump’s Republican “base is still strongly behind him.”
The story of Trump’s popularity is the same.
Averaging the most recent national polls, the president’s approval ratings are slightly lower than they were during his first term in office, but they are still higher than they were then. A lot of recent polls also show that the number of Americans who believe the country is on the right track has risen to over 40%. Even though they are still negative, these are the best right track/wrong track numbers we’ve seen in years.
So how does Trump compare to the person who came before him?
Biden started the game in a good position. During the first six months of his one term as president, his approval rating stayed in the low to mid-50s, while his disapproval rating stayed in the upper 30s to low to mid-40s.
But Biden’s numbers went down in the late summer and fall of 2021. This was because of how he was criticized for handling the tumultuous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, as well as a rise in inflation and a large number of people coming into the U.S. through its southern border with Mexico.
During the rest of Biden’s presidency, his approval rating stayed below zero.
“He just got crippled and never recovered,” Shaw said of Biden.
