Why Trump's approval ratings are tanking: 3 issues hurting Republicans now

Donald Trump’s presidency is haemorrhaging support – and the numbers are brutal.

In a political tremor that has Washington reeling, Trump is plunging in national polls at a speed that has even his allies sounding the alarm.

Bloomberg’s Joshua Green delivered the grim verdict: the president is slipping, and the collapse could drag the entire Republican Party down.

Every major polling outfit now shows Trump underwater.

Yet nothing stings quite like the latest Fox News survey, the one network Trump once called “his favourite.”

Only 41% of Americans approve of his performance, the worst number Fox has ever recorded for him since the chaotic fall of 2017.

The man who bragged “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and not lose any voters” is suddenly bleeding support from the very people who once adored him.

The Fox poll didn’t just hurt; it eviscerated.

Trump’s disapproval ratings have spiked to record highs among men, white voters, and non-college-educated Americans, the beating heart of the Make-America-Great-Again (MAGA) nation.

Three-quarters of respondents now say they view the economy negatively.

And in a rebuke so sharp it could draw blood, voters now blame Donald Trump for those economic woes, not Joe Biden, by a crushing two-to-one margin.

If the midterms were held tomorrow, Democrats wouldn’t just win; they’d win big.

A fresh Marist poll shows independent voters, the ultimate kingmakers, now favouring Democratic candidates by a staggering 33 points.

Nick Catoggio of The Dispatch didn’t mince words.

“I’d love to tell you that Trump is being dragged down by ‘his authoritarian pathologies or his naked corruption’,” he wrote.

“But the reason he’s sinking is because he has chosen to make the very issue he was elected to solve, the high cost of living, even worse.”

Catoggio’s dagger: “tariffs are eating his presidency alive.”

He’s not alone in this estimation.

A new YouGov poll found 73% of voters, including 56% of Republicans, believe Trump’s beloved tariff war has driven prices upward.

The man who promised to make groceries cheaper has, in the eyes of most Americans, made them burn.

Voters might have given him “loads of slack” while he cleaned up Biden’s “inflationary mess,” Catoggio wrote.

Instead, Trump doubled down on tariffs. In doing so, he has handed Democrats the political momentum on a silver platter.

Even Trump-friendly voices are running out of adulation.

The New York Times’ Ross Douthat reminded readers that Trump has staged comebacks before.

When his numbers cratered last April, he quietly eased off the tariff rhetoric, “stopped shipping people to the Salvadoran dungeon,” and hit pause on brutal spending cuts.

The bleeding stopped.

But this time?

“The prescription is less obvious,” Douthat wrote.

Like Biden before him, Trump is trapped in an economy that “isn’t terrible, but leaves people chronically dissatisfied.”

You can’t fix that kind of slow-burn anger with an executive order or a late-night tweet.

The White House keeps touting artificial intelligence (AI) as the great growth accelerator of tomorrow, but voters aren’t worried about ChatGPT; they’re worried about eggs, rent, and whether their job will exist next year.

On those life-or-death issues, Douthat delivered the chilling bottom line: the White House has no clear plan.

With less than a year until the midterms, the clock is ticking, the tariffs are biting, and the goodwill is gone.

For the first time since 2016, Donald Trump no longer looks invincible, and the Republican Party is not very happy about it.

“That’s the position of a political loser,” he wrote, “and sooner or later, a lame duck.”