Trump’s poll collapse: can he stop the slide?

President Trump is slumping in the polls, said Joshua Green on Bloomberg, and he may drag the Republican Party down with him. He is now receiving a negative approval rating from every major pollster. But the “most stinging” numbers came in a recent Fox News survey, in which only 41% of respondents approved of Trump’s job performance – his lowest rating in the poll since October 2017.

Squandered goodwill

The survey had plenty of other bad news for Trump, including career-high levels of disapproval from men, white voters, and those without a college degree. More than three-quarters of all respondents viewed the economy negatively, and “in a rebuke to a president who routinely blames economic woes on former president Joe Biden”, voters blame Trump, by a margin of two to one. Democrats would likely “win big” if the midterms were held tomorrow, said The Hill. A new Marist poll suggests that independents now favour Democrats by a 33-point margin.

I’d love to tell you that Trump is being dragged down by “his authoritarian pathologies or his naked corruption”, said Nick Catoggio on The Dispatch. 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. “Tariffs are eating his presidency alive.” In a recent YouGov poll, 73% of voters, including 56% of Republicans, said Trump’s signature economic policy has raised prices.

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It didn’t have to be like this. Voters would have given Trump “loads of slack” had he tried to clean up the “inflationary mess” left by Biden. Instead, he squandered that goodwill on tariffs, and helped Democrats up off the mat.

No obvious solution

Trump has clawed his way back up the polls before, said Ross Douthat in The New York Times. When his numbers tanked in April, he dialled back tariffs, “stopped shipping people to the Salvadoran dungeon”, and halted government cuts. Now “the prescription is less obvious”.

Like Biden, Trump is dealing with an economy that “isn’t terrible, but leaves people chronically dissatisfied”, and he can’t change that “via executive fiat”. His administration keeps talking about how its support for artificial intelligence will supercharge the economy. But that doesn’t play well with voters worried now about inflation, jobs and housing. On those fronts, the White House seems to lack any policy. “That’s the position of a political loser – and sooner or later, a lame duck.”