Trump's approval rating slides: US president 'significantly underwater'

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00:00For more, then, we'll speak to Ian Reifowitz. He is a distinguished professor of history at

00:05SUNY Empire State University and also co-author of the 2025 book Riling Up the Base, examining

00:11Trump's use of stereotypes through an interdisciplinary lens. Ian, thank you so

00:14much for joining us today, as always. So like I said, I mean, there's nearly a year to go until

00:19the midterms. That is a lot of time. But how big of a deal do you think these latest polling

00:24numbers are? Well, I think they're important. It's certainly better to be above water than

00:31underwater. Trump is significantly underwater. You mentioned the APNORC poll. There have been a

00:36number of other polls that have similar results. You can actually look at the average across a

00:40number of polls, which some polling aggregators do. And those numbers have shown him dropping

00:45significantly since last summer. We also have evidence not just from polls, but from elections

00:51where Republicans have done very poorly. And you also have just last week evidence of his

00:56political weakness. Indiana Republicans in the state Senate rejected very strong efforts by Trump,

01:04which included a threat to cut off all federal funding to the state. They rejected his push to

01:08do redistricting in their state, which the long story short is it would have allowed Republicans to

01:13gain two extra seats in the House, U.S. House, by redrawing the district lines within Indiana,

01:19such that the existing two Democratic House members basically would have would have seen

01:23their districts drawn in such a way that they couldn't win or that Republicans would expect

01:27that they couldn't win. Indiana Republicans just said no to Trump. And then we have the election

01:32results themselves. Just this week, Republicans lost the Miami mayor's election. That was a seat they

01:38held for the last 30 years. They lost a statehouse seat in Georgia that they had previously gerrymandered

01:44to be a safe seat. Right. They broke up a Democratic seat into three Republican safe

01:50seats, not safe enough, apparently. The week before, there was a U.S. House seat in Tennessee

01:54where the Republican candidate underperformed by 13 points against an incredibly liberal Democrat

02:00who wasn't a good fit for the district. Last month, you had New Jersey governor race won by the

02:05Democrats. You had statewide elections where Republicans lost to Democrats in Georgia,

02:11a really important 50-50 state. They lost the Virginia. Democrats won the Virginia governor's

02:16race flipping that seat. They won a number of seats in the statehouse, enough for them to

02:20gerrymander Democrats to gerrymander the House districts in Virginia to counter what Republicans

02:26done in Texas and Florida. Just overall, and this is amazing, of all the state legislative seats up

02:32this year, Democrats have flipped 20 percent of the Republican-held seats. Republicans have flipped

02:37zero Democratic seats. It's not going well for Trump's party.

02:42So, Ian, I mean, what do you think is driving the decline in support, especially because I think

02:45that you could argue with foreign policy aside, the Trump administration in many ways is doing

02:51exactly what it said it was going to do, especially on things like immigration. So is it simply the

02:57affordability crisis or is it much bigger than that?

03:02Well, one of the things he said he was going to do was bring down prices, right,

03:05the affordability crisis. He ran on that. He ran against Biden and Larry Harris on inflation,

03:11and inflation has remained at the same level it was when Biden left office, roughly about 3 percent,

03:18the level that Trump said was intolerable. And people can see that and they can feel that.

03:22His level of support or lack of support on the economy is even lower than his lack of support or

03:29his low support on immigration, where he's still, according to most polls, underwater,

03:33under 50-50. But it's not as bad as on the economy. And that really is about affordability

03:39and inflation. And it was what he ran on and he hasn't delivered. And people are tying the

03:44affordability issue to his policy, specifically tariffs, right? Tariffs increase the price of

03:50imported goods. It increases the price that people pay in the store or, I guess, online when they buy

03:56not only imported goods, but even the domestic goods where the producers can raise prices to

04:01sort of keep up with the prices of the imported goods. So they, A, see the prices are, you know,

04:06the inflation is continuing at the same rate. And B, they can tie it to specific Trump policies.

04:10That's a bad recipe for Trump.

04:13Do you think we're seeing Republicans openly sound the alarm about the president's declining

04:17popularity? Or do you think that he's surrounding himself with people who are telling him what he

04:22wants to hear?

04:23Well, I think the people surrounding him are telling him what he wants to hear. But I think the people

04:27outside his intimate circle are sounding the alarm. You saw Marjorie Taylor Greene,

04:32a very right-wing supporter of Trump for years. And now it's not only that she's retiring from the

04:39House, but talking about the dysfunction of the Republican Party, the dysfunction of leadership.

04:43Another House Republican, Nancy Mace, is criticized, strongly criticized House Republican leadership.

04:50Without mentioning, without mentioning Trump directly, that's about as close to talking about

04:53Trump as a problem as you're going to see with House Republicans or with Republicans in general.

04:59The one thing they've been afraid of is Trump saying, I'm going to back a primary opponent against

05:03you in a Republican primary. Well, people retiring are basically saying, listen, I don't want to deal

05:09with that anymore. And people coming out against him who are running for re-election, at least in

05:14some way. And you're seeing some House and Senate votes. You saw last week four Republicans voting

05:18with the Democrats on their health care proposal to extend Obamacare subsidies. Those are all ways

05:24in which Republicans are saying, I'm not that afraid of Trump right now, at least compared to maybe where

05:29I was a year or two or three ago. Professor Ian Reifowitz, that's unfortunately all we have time for.

05:35But thank you so very much for those elements of context.

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