Much more of the damage to Trump’s approval on the economy was done by the launching of the sweeping tariff war than the energy-price shocks of the Iran war.
I will let Michael have the last word on his own characterization of his own position. But I will add a few further comments and a lot of polling data on what’s missing from his discussion of mine. He makes an argument that strikes me as skating perilously close to saying that it doesn’t matter what Trump’s economic policies are to his political fate, voters will dislike the policies equally. Lest I be accused of misreading that, here is the whole passage, emphasis mine:
Trump’s economic agenda has never been popular, even when people loved the economy in his first term. Polls alone as evidence prove too much. People have hated the tax cuts almost as much or more than the tariffs. Trump’s tax cuts in the first term started at 29 percent approval (Gallup). The TCJA average for them is 33 percent approval, and Gallup never recorded an above-water number for them.
In the second term, polls from KFF, Morning Consult, and Fox News in the summer found the Trump tax cuts in the mid-30s. Although there isn’t one consistent poll question across both administrations, from what I can see, tariff opinion has barely moved since 2018 (Quinnipiac, AP-Norc, CNN/SSRS). That rough reading is true even if the nature of the tariffs changed dramatically.
Trump’s economic agenda has always been unpopular as policy, and the Liberation Day tariffs, if they were the sole cause of his fall afterwards — and they were not — only brought him down to where he was during the first administration. That’s a slide I’ve acknowledged half a dozen times. Nor since Liberation Day have I ever been less than candid about my structural, economic, and legal criticisms of the tariffs, even if I strenuously reject free trade as policy and ideology and support the effort to increase investment in America. To me, the drop in support on Liberation Day looks real enough, but it looks like a return to a baseline. I’m searching for an explanation for why 2026 is so much worse than 2018.
I do not think one needs to be Sherlock Holmes to search for an explanation of why 2026 is so much worse than 2018, and there’s a lot hiding in that “even when people loved the economy in his first term” qualifier. We don’t have to look only at overall approval ratings or at opinions on particular policies. I prefer to look at the RealClearPolitics poll averages, which I’ve been using for over 20 years now, rather than cherry-pick particular polls. Look at the RCP poll averages of public approval of Trump’s handling of the economy, a topic on which we happen to have a large dataset of public polling covering the past decade. In his first term, Trump left office with a positive rating of 50.2 percent approval against 46.6 percent disapproval of his management of the economy — this after nearly a full year in which the government had throttled the economy, and at a time when January 6 had cast the worst possible odor over everything Trump-related.
As you scroll back through the polling on the economy, Trump was above 50 percent approval in the polls far more often than not throughout his first term, regardless of the overall shape of his political fortunes. At the time of the 2018 election, even with Trump in the dumps generally, he had a positive approval of 51.4 percent on the economy, compared with 43 percent disapproval: a margin of +8.4 percent. In the 25 polls in the average between Labor Day and Election Day 2018, his average showing was 50.8 percent approval on the economy, 42.4 percent disapproval, and an identical +8.4 margin. He had a double-digit margin of positive approval in ten of the 25 polls on the issue, and was above 50 percent approval in 17 out of 25. Voters took out their frustrations with Trump on Republicans in the House and the Midwestern governorships, but it could have been much worse, with the party gaining Senate seats and holding key Sun Belt governors’ races. The strong Trump brand on the economy was one reason why.
If you widen the lens to Trump’s entire first term and average all 588 polls on the economy in RCP, it averages to 49.2 percent approval and 44.1 percent disapproval (a +5.1 percent margin). Trump had a positive approval rating in 475 polls, 123 of those by double digits; a negative approval rating on the economy in 83 polls, only seven of them by double digits; and was tied in 30 polls. Overall, that’s an extremely strong and persistent record of public trust in Trump’s management of the economy, even at times when he was roundly unpopular as a whole and cruising to defeats in the midterms and the 2020 election.
Now, look at the second term. The numbers tell a quite different story and one with very visible trends and watersheds over time. Trump’s approval on the economy on Election Day 2026 stood at 32.9 percent approval and 64.7 percent disapproval — catastrophic numbers, 31.8 points underwater. Out of 334 second-term polls on his job on the economy, Trump has been in positive territory in only eight polls, just once by double digits (that in January 2025), and all eight coming before the tariff rollout; he’s been tied twice and in negative territory in the other 324 polls. His approval on the economy has been at or above 50 percent twice; his disapproval has been at or above 50 percent 297 times, at or above 60 percent 87 times, and at or above 70 percent five times. This is a disastrous reversal.
Now, consider the timeline. In 13 polls taken through March 4, 2025 — around the point where the tariff push was beginning in earnest — Trump’s average approval on the economy was 46.2 percent approval and 46.2 percent disapproval, already visibly weaker than his first term but still quite respectable. In 18 polls over the next month, that fell off to 43.9 percent approval against 51.9 percent disapproval — a sharp drop, putting Trump in significantly worse shape on the economy than he had ever been in his first term. Already, he was double digits underwater in ten of the 18 polls. It only went downhill from there.
In 183 polls taken between “liberation day” 2025 and the start of the Iran war, Trump’s approval on the economy averaged 41.5 percent approval and 54.5 percent disapproval. And things were not recovering: averaging 22 polls taken in the month before the war, Trump was down to 39.9 percent approval against 56 percent disapproval, a 16.1 point deficit. He was double digits underwater in 19 of the 22 polls, and 20 points underwater in seven of them. To repeat: Trump suffered a net 24.5 point decline on the economy between Election Day 2018 and the start of the Iran war. Yuge!
Did things get even worse once the war started? Absolutely. In 120 polls taken since the start of the war, Trump’s average approval on the economy has been 35.6 percent, compared with 60.5 percent, a ghastly 25-point deficit. Only seven polls in that period showed him less than double digits underwater. As we saw from the final averages, the bottom really fell out under the campaign’s final month.
I won’t rehash all the same analysis here for polling on inflation, but there, too, Trump has regularly polled double digits underwater since the tariff rollout in March 2025, and there, too, things got worse after the war started and spiraled down in the closing weeks of the midterm campaign. We can’t really compare that to Trump’s first term, during which inflation was such a nonissue that hardly anybody was polling voters about it.
The data are quite clear: Voters strongly trusted Donald Trump on the economy during his first term. They lost that trust when he launched a sweeping tariff war against most of the planet Earth. His position eroded further with the energy-price shocks of the Iran war — but much more of the damage was done before rather than after February 28, 2026.