President Donald Trump appears to have lost a significant amount of support from a critical sector of his own party since last year. It’s a bad sign for his maximalist governing strategy — and a hopeful bit of news for those organizing a coalition against his autocratic agenda.
According to the Pew Research Center, which surveyed more than 8,000 U.S. adults between Jan. 20 and Jan. 26, Trump’s approval rating has dropped from 40% in the fall to 37% today, and 50% say that the Trump administration’s actions have been worse than they expected, versus 21% who say they’re better than expected. But here’s where it gets strikingly bad for the president: “Only about a quarter of Americans today (27%) say they support all or most of Trump’s policies and plans, down from 35% when he returned to office last year. That change has come entirely among Republicans,” Pew reported.
That response — whether you support all or most of the president’s plans — is a decent proxy for the president’s core base, the swath of the public that’s likely to sign off on anything he does. Considering that Trump is showing fascistic ambition with the way he’s transforming Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, into a rogue paramilitary force, seeking to annex foreign territories and suppressing free speech, that’s an uncomfortably large swath of the population for a country that prides itself on being the oldest democracy in the world.
Trump’s approval on immigration has plummeted across many surveys over the past year.
But combined with the roughly 10-percentage-point decline in his overall approval ratings since getting elected, it’s clear that Trump has markedly less political capital than during the pro-Trump “vibe shift” that took place when Trump narrowly won the popular vote, and an Electoral College landslide, in the 2024 election.
Part of what’s driving it appears to be Trump’s failure to address the affordability crisis. In November, a Politico poll, conducted by Public First, found that a majority of Trump voters believed he was partially or entirely responsible for an economy that many of them believe suffers from an unprecedented cost-of-living crisis. A Reuters-Ipsos survey conducted Jan. 12-13 found Trump’s economic approval rating at 34%, and only 30% approval of his handling of the cost of living.
Another likely factor is the salience of Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement agenda, which has resulted in the killing of two U.S. citizens in brutal shootings. Trump’s approval on immigration has plummeted across many surveys over the past year, and “abolish ICE” has skyrocketed in popularity. Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster, wrote in The New York Times on Thursday that her polling showed that Trump’s immigration rating had flipped from 55% approval to 55% disapproval in the past year.








