Polls Show Trump’s Approval Rating Slipping Again
Despite reasonably good economic news, due partly to the perpetual delay in implementation of his most dangerous tariff proposals, Donald Trump’s job-approval numbers appear to be sliding again after a period of stabilization and modest rises. As of June 17, here’s how Silver Bulletin characterized recent polls on Trump’s performance:
The polls are coming hard and fast so far this week. It’s only Tuesday, and we’ve already seen eight new releases (if you count one from over the weekend). On balance, they aren’t great for Donald Trump, whose approval ratings have been on the decline since Tuesday. Here’s a list of the latest polls (in terms of Trump’s net approval):
SurveyMonkey/NBC: -10
Harvard/Harris: -4
TIPP: -7
Verasight/Strength in Numbers: -14
Morning Consult: -6
Ipsos/Reuters: -12
YouGov/Economist: -13
Pew Research Center: -17
As of today, 44.5 percent of Americans approve of Donald Trump’s job performance and 52.1 disapprove. That’s a net approval rating of -7.6, down from -3.6 one week ago. His strong approval rating is also down from 29.5 percent last Tuesday to 27.0 percent today.
That’s a pretty steep decline in job approval over a short period. But as we are learning, perceptions of Trump’s popularity very much depend on which pollster is releasing what data when. Here’s the president’s own assessment of his polls on the morning of June 18 as he was letting the press know we weren’t going to war with Iran right away:
Trump: "There was a poll that just came out today. My approval rating is the highest it's ever been." pic.twitter.com/Yc6g8wkoGO
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 18, 2025
Then there was this Trump post on Truth Social the night before, which simply read, with the president’s signature modesty and even the preposition capitalized, “Great Poll Numbers For Trump!”
It’s all but certain he was talking about an InsiderAdvantage survey released on June 17 that showed his approval rating at 54 percent positive, 44 percent negative. The crosstabs IA provided show some pretty dubious findings (such as 24 percent of self-identified Democrats and 61 percent of likely voters under 40 approving of Trump’s job performance). But the president is still wrong about this poll giving him unprecedented approval ratings. The last two IA polls showed him at 55 percent approval in May and 56 percent in January. Suffice it to say that IA and Trafalgar Group consistently find the president and candidates of his party doing better than in almost any other polls. And this one IA poll helped improve Trump’s net approval rating at Silver Bulletin literally overnight, from -7.6 percent to -6.4 percent.
The most objective way to assess trends in presidential job approval is to compare particular pollsters over time. And it does appear the latest trends are at least modestly negative for Trump. Economist-YouGov had his net approval rating at -5 percent on June 2, -8 percent on June 9, and -9 percent on June 16. Reuters-Ipsos had net presidential approval at -8 percent and then -10 percent in two May surveys and at -12 percent as of June 16. Harris-Harvard had Trump’s net approval at +2 percent in April, -1 percent in May, and -4 percent in June. Morning Consult’s weekly tracking poll had Trump slip a bit from -4 percent to -6 percent in June. And Echelon Insights similarly showed a -6 percent approval ratio in May and a -8 percent ratio in June.
On individual issues, public assessments of Trump’s performance in some areas have eroded a bit recently as well, according to averages compiled by Silver Bulletin. Perhaps reflecting events in Los Angeles, his net approval on immigration has dropped from +4.6 percent on June 7 to -4 percent on June 18. His ratings on the economy have been basically stable (much like the economy itself) but are still underwater at -11.8 percent. His assessments on inflation, already terrible, have gotten worse, from -17.5 percent at the beginning of June to -21.1 percent now.
Pollsters are just now getting around to assessing public judgments of Trump’s One Big Beautiful budget-reconciliation bill. Much of the public knows little about it, but early reactions lean pretty strongly negative. A new Washington Post–Ipsos survey released June 17 showed 23 percent supporting the bill, 42 percent opposing it, and 34 percent expressing no opinion. Notably, only 49 percent of self-identified Republicans supported it. The poll also showed stronger support among respondents paying the least attention to the details, which suggests that when media attention increases, opposition could grow. A June 11 Quinnipiac poll showed two-to-one public opposition to the bill, with 20 percent undecided.
It’s unclear whether the latest talk of U.S. intervention in the Israel-Iran war is fully penetrating public consciousness. The latest (June 16) Economist-YouGov poll shows Americans decisively opposing such intervention by a 60 percent to 16 percent margin with very little variation among Republicans, Democrats, and independents. But showing that the framing of such questions matters a lot, the aforementioned Insider Advantage poll showed a literally incredible 74 percent of likely voters agreeing that “Iran must be prevented from developing a nuclear weapon by any means necessary.”
Context is everything.