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AIPROPX ReportNewsweek · 52m ago
How Trump's Approval Rating Has Changed on Four Core Campaign Issues
0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. President Donald Trump won a second term in 2024 on four central pledges: seal the border, avoid new foreign wars, fix the economy and clean up Washington . Nineteen months into his term, polling shows him underwater on the four of them.
Trump's overall net approval rating, the share who approve of his job performance minus the share who disapprove, stood at positive 11.6 points on his first full day back in office, January 21, 2025, according to the Silver Bulletin polling average maintained by statistician Nate Silver. That was a far stronger opening number than in his first term, boosted by early positive ratings on immigration and the economy, the same two issues that would later drag him underwater.
Davis Ingle, White House spokesperson, told Newsweek, “The ultimate poll was November 5th 2024 when nearly 80 million Americans overwhelmingly elected President Trump to deliver on his popular and commonsense agenda. No other President in history has accomplished more for the American people than President Trump, who is working tirelessly to create jobs, cool inflation, increase housing affordability, and more. The President has already made historic progress not only in America but around the world, and this is just the beginning as his agenda continues taking effect."
Here is how each of the four issues has moved since Trump took office.
The decline since then has tracked a string of flashpoints. Polling averages point to the “Liberation Day” tariff rollout in April 2025, the Justice Department’s closure of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation that summer, the government shutdown, aggressive immigration enforcement tactics and the war Trump launched against Iran in the spring of 2026 as the main drivers.
Immigration was the centerpiece of Trump's 2024 campaign. At a rally in Aurora, Colorado, on October 11, 2024, he told supporters: "We will close the border. We will stop the invasion of illegals into our country. We will defend our territory. We will not be conquered." He paired the line at nearly every stop with a promise to launch "the largest deportation operation in the history of the United States."
Immigration is still Trump's best-rated issue, yet it has weakened substantially since he took office. The Silver Bulletin average put him at positive 7 points on immigration on January 21, 2025. He peaked near positive 11 points in early March 2025. By August 20, 2026, his net approval on the issue had fallen to negative 11.2 points, according to the same average.
Recent single polls tell a similar story. A Quinnipiac University poll of registered voters conducted July 23-27, 2026, found 40 percent approved of Trump's handling of immigration, while 57 percent disapproved. Border crossings have fallen sharply since Trump took office, a trend the White House has repeatedly cited as proof the pledge was kept. Even though Trump's border policy was more popular at the start of his second term, public sentiment has fallen, especially after several fatal incidents that took place, including the deaths of Renée Nicole Good, Alex Pretti, and Ruben Ray Martinez.
Trump campaigned as a candidate who would keep the country out of new conflicts and end the ones already underway. He said on dozens of occasions that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war before taking office or within his first day back in the White House.
"If it's not solved, I will have it solved in 24 hours with Zelensky and with Putin, and there's a very easy negotiation to take place," he told Fox News host Sean Hannity in March 2023. He later called the pledge "a little bit sarcastic."
Trump's overall approval has moved in step with the on-again, off-again ceasefire between the United States and Iran, according to the Silver Bulletin average. His numbers ticked up after a Pakistan-brokered ceasefire took hold in early April 2026, then slid when fighting resumed weeks later under what Iran called "Project Freedom," including Iranian strikes on the United Arab Emirates.
Approval firmed again in June, when the two countries signed a memorandum of understanding alongside talks over the Strait of Hormuz. It fell once more in July, after the memorandum collapsed and Iran struck U.S. bases in Bahrain and Kuwait. The 60-day deadline attached to that memorandum expired in early August with no final deal in place, and Trump's approval has held in roughly the same underwater range since.
Trump ran heavily on affordability. "Starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again, to bring down the prices of all goods," he told a rally in Bozeman, Montana, in August 2024. He repeated the pledge through the final months of the campaign, often adding a line about grocery and energy costs: "Prices will come down. They'll come down fast."
The economy was Trump's second-strongest issue when he took office. Today it ranks among his weakest. The Silver Bulletin average shows his net approval on the economy at positive 6 points on January 21, 2025, briefly rising above positive 8 points in late January. By August 20, 2026, it had fallen to negative 28.3 points. Net approval on cost of living and inflation specifically started even lower, at negative 6 points, and has since fallen to negative 42.7 points. That is his worst-rated issue in the entire tracker.
Quinnipiac's July 2026 poll found 34 percent approved of Trump's handling of the economy overall, versus 62 percent who disapproved. Nearly half of voters in that poll, 49 percent, said they were financially worse off than a year earlier.
Compared with when Trump made the Montana campaign pledge in August 2024:
Trump's oldest campaign slogan, dating to his 2016 run, remained a fixture of his 2024 messaging. At a Wisconsin rally that September, he vowed to "cast out the corrupt political class...
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