For all of the tumult and disruption that’s accompanied President Donald Trump’s return to the White House, his base — his voters and supporters in the diverse right-wing media ecosystem — has been his rock. No matter how nasty and accurate the criticisms he faces, Trump’s base continues to treat him as the powerful, popular president he envisions himself to be. If he says he’s doing a great job, they’re right there to agree.
But that is getting much harder than it used to be.
Fox News released new polling last week that showed Americans broadly remain skeptical of Trump’s leadership as president. That includes his handling of what was once his strongest issue: the economy. Trump’s re-election in 2024 was powered heavily by the surge in prices that followed the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic, a surge that Trump promised to reverse.
But — in part because he couldn’t — he hasn’t. As a result, only 33% of Americans approve of his handling of the cost of living, with two-thirds disapproving. That’s a net approval rating of minus-35, a drop from the already poor minus-26 he saw last April, when the question was centered broadly on inflation. Even among Republicans, net approval of his handling of prices has fallen. Last April, a quarter of Republicans disapproved of the job he’s doing. Now, a third do.
Polling from CBS News/YouGov finds similar skepticism about how Trump is handling the economy. Three-quarters of Americans think he’s not doing enough to lower prices — including 50% of Republicans. Another 62% of Americans think he has applied too many tariffs, a view also held by 25% of his own party.
This has been a lingering problem for Trump for months now. His and his administration’s insistence that economic problems are fleeting, that “affordability” is an invented issue or that an economic boom is imminent — or underway — simply doesn’t match Americans’ actual experience. That includes many of the Republicans who otherwise approve of his performance in the Oval Office.
Trump saw last month’s State of the Union address as a way to reframe how Americans saw the issue. Here was an opportunity to speak to millions of viewers and tell them, again, how the economy was doing well, whatever they thought they were seeing in their bank accounts.
Since that speech, however, many of the purported successes he celebrated have been undercut dramatically by new data and new developments. Friday’s jobs report showed a decline in employment, rather than ongoing growth. His decision to launch military strikes on Iran upended the always unsteady market for oil, rippling out into markets broadly.
But you don’t have to take my word for it. Here’s an overview of what Trump said in his State of the Union address — and how things have eroded since then.
“More Americans are working today than at any time in the history of our country,” Trump said during his Feb. 24 speech. And, at the time, that was true. The 158,558,000 seasonally adjusted nonfarm employees estimated to have been working that month was a new high. Such records carry with them a big asterisk. As the population grows, so generally does the number of workers.
Regardless, that high-water mark both obscured the reality of the jobs market and held up poorly as a metric.
Since Trump took office in January 2025, the number of people working has repeatedly declined month over month.
In fact, there are now fewer people working in the U.S., according to data from Trump’s own administration, than were employed in April 2025, the month Trump announced the sweeping tariffs he predicted would lead to an economic surge.
Contrast that with job growth in 2024, which rose steadily. Trump and his team have tried to blame poor economic figures on former President Joe Biden, but it’s clear that the shifts we’ve seen are largely a function of Trump’s own decisions.
“The stock market has set 53 all-time record highs since the election,” Trump also said at the State of the Union address. He later added that “the Dow Jones [Industrial Average] broke 50,000, four years ahead of schedule, and the S&P [500] hit 7,000 where it wasn’t supposed to do it for many years.”
By the time he gave the speech, the Dow had already retreated from the high he celebrated. It peaked on Feb. 10 and is down more than 4% since then. The S&P 500, meanwhile, never closed at the 7,000-point mark Trump touted.
You’ll notice that there had been another collapse in stock prices during Trump’s second term. That bottomed out in April, the month of his “Liberation Day” tariff announcements. Speaking about prices during the State of the Union address, Trump pointed at declines in the prices of specific products, such as eggs. He did not mention that his policies weren’t generally deserving of credit for those declines; the price of eggs shot up right before he was inaugurated due to the bird flu. Still, Trump celebrated that “in 12 months, my administration has driven core inflation down to the lowest level in more than five years. And in the last three months of 2025, it was down to 1.7%.” The reality is that inflation remains a challenge. In January, inflation rose 2.4% relative to the year prior. That’s lower than the rate inflation has been, certainly, but it’s not the 1.7% that Trump preferred to mention. More importantly, it’s not clear that we’re going to see the rate of inflation continue to drop. In fact, given the price of gas, it’s probably the opposite. During his State of the Union speech, Trump boasted that gasoline prices were “now below $2.30 a gallon in most states, and in some places, $1.99 a gallon.” That cost, he said, was “the lowest in four years, and falling fast.” Not anymore. The eruption of war with Iran — at Trump’s direction, mind you — has pushed global oil prices higher and global markets lower. Gas prices are up in every state since his speech. In fact, they are up more in states that voted for him in 2024 than in states that didn’t. It’s important to note how much of this is self-inflicted on Trump’s part. He wants economic growth, lower prices and cheap gas, but he implements tariffs and launched a war in the Middle East — for reasons that remain unexplained. The extent to which presidential policy affects the economy has long been debated, but in this case and at this moment, it’s clear that Trump himself is having a robust effect on the trends he is pretending don’t exist. So far, his base continues to applaud his presidency and support his efforts. Perhaps — or probably — they will continue to do so. But Republicans around Trump are probably less sanguine about this downward shift in an already sluggish economy. It’s they who are facing voters in November, and it is they who need to rely on votes from people who might not be part of Trump’s base. Many House Republicans, for example, will face voters in eight months and, if these economic patterns continue, be asked why they declined to do anything to reverse them. Reminding independents that the Dow Jones hit 50,000 back in February probably won’t cut it.
Philip Bump is a data journalist and MS NOW contributor. 
