Out MSNBC host Rachel Maddow pointed out that a new slate of polls shows Donald Trump’s popularity tanking even as he is supposed to still be in the “honeymoon” stage of his second term.
She noted a CNN poll found that only 47% of Americans approve of Trump’s actions so far in office and 52% disapprove, giving him a net disapproval rating of 5%. The latest Pew Research Center poll shows a net disapproval rating of 4%. The latest Reuters poll has Trump with a disapproval rating of 7%. And the Washington Post’s latest poll shows his disapproval rating is 8%.
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“All of this, absolutely historically unprecedented,” Maddow noted. “No president has ever come out of the gate with numbers like this, ever before.”
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Maddow: All of this absolutely historically unprecedented. No president has ever come out of the gate with numbers like this ever before. And it is across the board
— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) February 21, 2025 at 3:43 AM
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Part of the issue with Trump’s unpopularity is that people view him as overstepping his authority. A YouGov poll conducted on February 19 found that 41% of participants say that Trump is a “dictator.” The CNN poll linked above found that 52% of Americans believe that Trump has “gone too far” when it comes to his use of presidential power, and only 8% believe he has “not gone far enough.”
The Reuters poll linked above also points to Trump’s handling of the economy as a source of unpopularity. Only 32% of respondents approved of how Trump has been handling inflation, something he talked about frequently on the campaign trail but hasn’t spent much time addressing while in office. Fifty-four percent of participants in that poll said they opposed new tariffs on imported goods.
Maddow noted that the drop in popularity occurred in this past month, just since his inauguration.
“What the data shows is that almost every single thing he has done is soundly and clearly and, in some cases, wildly unpopular with the American people,” she said. She then cited a Quinnipiac poll that found that people were more likely to disapprove than approve of Trump’s handling of foreign policy, trade policy, federal workforce measures, the invasion of Ukraine, the Israel-Hamas War, and the economy.
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