Donald Trump won the 2024 election on a straightforward promise: bring down the cost of living. Eighteen months into his second term, the numbers tell a different story and voters are responding accordingly.
His aggregate approval rating has fallen to 37–38%, a second-term low driven by a convergence of economic pressures: a 3.8% inflation surge, gas prices averaging $4.50 per gallon, and grocery bills that have quietly climbed for more than a year. According to historical Gallup data and analysis from the University of Massachusetts, that puts him at the lowest mid-term approval of any U.S. president since Jimmy Carter in 1977.
What the Polls Actually Show
The headline approval number understates how deep the dissatisfaction runs on specific issues.
An Economist/YouGov poll found that only 25% of Americans approve of how Trump is handling inflation and prices while 69% disapprove. That net rating of -44% is worse than any comparable point during either his or Joe Biden’s presidencies, and worse than any point in Biden’s term when grocery inflation was at its peak.
His overall job approval has followed the same trajectory. Recent New York Times/Siena and YouGov polls put his approval between 36% and 37%, while a CBS News poll found that 63% of voters disapprove of his overall performance. Around 61% of Americans now believe the U.S. economy is actively getting worse, the highest level of economic pessimism recorded during either of his presidential terms.
How He Compares to Every Modern President
To understand what a sub-40% approval rating means in historical terms, it helps to look at where other presidents bottomed out and what put them there.
| President | Their Lowest Ever Approval | Context |
|---|---|---|
| Harry S. Truman | 22% (1952) | Korean War stalemate and inflation |
| Richard Nixon | 24% (1974) | Watergate scandal, days before resignation |
| George W. Bush | 25% (2008) | Global financial crash and the Iraq War |
| Jimmy Carter | 28% (1979) | Stagflation crisis and gas shortages |
| Donald Trump (Term 1) | 34% (2021) | Following the January 6th Capitol riots |
| Joe Biden | 36% (2024) | Peak post-pandemic inflation and grocery prices |
| Donald Trump (Term 2) | 37–38% (2026) | 3.8% inflation, $4.50 gas, Iran conflict |
| Barack Obama | 38% (2011/2014) | 2011 debt-ceiling crisis and 2014 midterms |
Trump has not yet reached the absolute historic lows of Truman, Nixon, or Bush but the trajectory and timing matter as much as the number itself. Those presidents hit rock bottom deep into crises that were already fully developed. Trump is entering a midterm election year while the economic pressures driving his decline are still actively building.
Three Things Pushing Prices and Polls Down
The Tariff Costs Settled onto Store Shelves
Throughout 2025, many large retailers quietly absorbed tariff costs rather than pass them directly to consumers relying on locked-in supplier contracts, backlogged inventory, and a wait-and-see approach while courts challenged the legality of the broadest import levies.
That cushion is now gone.
The U.S. Supreme Court and the Court of International Trade recently struck down portions of Trump’s “Liberation Day” emergency tariffs and the 10% global import levy as unlawful. But prices haven’t come back down. Data from Harvard’s Tariff Tracker and the Federal Reserve shows that businesses passed tariff costs almost entirely onto consumers, driving retail prices of imported goods up by an average of 6.8 percentage points above pre-tariff trends. Even with companies receiving tax refunds for tariffs ruled unlawful, retailers show no sign of rolling back shelf prices to their 2024 baselines.
The cumulative damage: between early 2025 and early 2026, the average American family paid more than $1,700 in direct and indirect tariff costs.
The hardest-hit categories, according to Tax Foundation analysis, include imported clothing (up 17.5 percentage points relative to pre-tariff baselines), building materials (up 10.5 points), home textiles (up 8 points), and furniture (up 7.4 points). On the grocery side, more than half of all food imports still face heavy tariff burdens with baked goods, European beer and spirits, and imported seafood among the most heavily exposed categories. EU food imports have been hit particularly hard, with roughly 96% of EU food products still subject to tariffs, driving up the cost of specialty items, wines, and cheeses significantly.
The core problem with food tariffs is structural: unlike manufactured goods, most imported food cannot simply be produced domestically, climate limitations and scarce agricultural land make “onshoring” groceries largely impossible. Grocery chains have no choice but to pass the costs to the checkout line.
The Iran Conflict Added a Gas Price Shock
Military conflict with Iran has severely disrupted global energy markets, pushing U.S. gas prices to an average of $4.50 per gallon and triggering broad-based price pressure across services and core goods. Energy costs feed into nearly every other sector of the economy transportation, manufacturing, food distribution amplifying the inflationary effect well beyond the gas pump.
The resulting 3.8% Consumer Price Index reading represents a three-year high, and it arrived at precisely the wrong political moment: just as tariff-driven retail price increases were finishing their slow migration onto store shelves.
Real Wages Are Now Falling Behind
For much of 2024 and early 2025, wage growth was outpacing inflation giving workers a genuine, if modest, sense of economic progress. That dynamic has reversed. Real average hourly earnings have dropped, meaning that despite nominal pay increases, consumer goods are officially less affordable for the average American than they were a year ago. When paychecks buy less than they did twelve months ago, approval ratings follow.
The Grocery Store as Political Battleground
The political sensitivity around food prices has become acute enough to generate unusual Washington optics. Top executives from Kroger and Piggly Wiggly recently met with Trump at the White House as the administration scrambled for ways to ease grocery store operating costs including loosening environmental refrigerant rules, a move widely described as largely symbolic given the scale of the underlying cost pressures.
The tariff environment has also reshuffled the retail landscape in ways that reveal just how differently consumers are responding. Walmart with the scale to negotiate supplier terms and absorb margin pressure better than regional competitors has emerged as the notable winner, posting 4.7% sales growth as consumers migrate toward its lower price points. Target, by contrast, saw a 1.7% drop in sales, its heavier reliance on discretionary goods like clothing and home décor leaving it far more exposed to tariff-driven price spikes. Kroger and Albertsons have landed somewhere in the middle, flat to marginal growth, but fighting to manage slim grocery margins against elevated food import costs that pushed their executives to lobby the White House directly.
Two Things That Make This Drop Different From History
The Rally Around the Flag Effect Never Arrived
When an American president commits military forces to a foreign conflict, public opinion historically swings in their favor, at least temporarily. George H.W. Bush jumped to 89% approval during the Gulf War. George W. Bush hit 90% in the weeks after September 11th.
Trump’s Iran campaign has produced no such bump. Instead, roughly two-thirds of voters disapprove of the conflict, and fewer than 25% believe it has been worth the economic cost. It’s one of the most striking departures from a well-established historical pattern in modern polling history.
His Core Base Is Starting to Fracture
Throughout his first term and into the 2024 election, Trump’s approval ratings were unusually stable hovering tightly between 39% and 45% because his core supporters remained committed regardless of external events. That floor is now showing cracks.
NBC News polling shows his approval among registered Republicans on the issue of inflation alone dropped 10 percentage points from 83% to 73%. That’s a meaningful shift within a group that has historically been among the most resistant to moving on Trump-related questions. Among independent voters, the swing has been more aggressive: 69% now disapprove of his overall performance.
It’s the combination, a cracking base plus alienated independents that makes the current polling environment particularly difficult for Republicans heading into midterms.
What This Means for the Midterms
Historical patterns are consistent on one point: incumbent presidents with sub-40% approval ratings heading into midterm elections tend to lose significant congressional ground. Democrats currently hold an 11-point lead in generic midterm polling, a gap that, if it holds anywhere near its current level, would translate into substantial seat changes.
The groups driving Trump’s decline are also the groups whose political behavior matters most in competitive districts: independent voters, young voters, and Latino voters, all of which helped deliver his 2024 victory and are now showing the sharpest disapproval movements in current polling.
Whether inflation moderates, whether the Iran situation stabilizes, and whether the court-ordered tariff rollbacks eventually filter through to consumer prices, all of those variables remain genuinely uncertain. What the data shows clearly right now is that the economic promises that won the 2024 election have not yet translated into economic reality for most American households. And in midterm elections, that gap between promise and experience tends to be what voters remember most.
