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.
And 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.
This is a preview of Zeeshan Aleem’s latest column. Read the full column here.
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