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. Considering that Trump is showing fascistic ambition with the way he’s transforming Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, into a rogue paramilitary force, seeking to annex foreign territories and suppressing free speech, that’s an uncomfortably large swath of the population for a country that prides itself on being the oldest democracy in the world.
Trump’s approval on immigration has plummeted across many surveys over the past year.
But 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.
Part of what’s driving it appears to be Trump’s failure to address the affordability crisis. In November, a Politico poll, conducted by Public First, found that a majority of Trump voters believed he was partially or entirely responsible for an economy that many of them believe suffers from an unprecedented cost-of-living crisis. A Reuters-Ipsos survey conducted Jan. 12-13 found Trump’s economic approval rating at 34%, and only 30% approval of his handling of the cost of living.
Another likely factor is the salience of Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement agenda, which has resulted in the killing of two U.S. citizens in brutal shootings. Trump’s approval on immigration has plummeted across many surveys over the past year, and “abolish ICE” has skyrocketed in popularity. Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster, wrote in The New York Times on Thursday that her polling showed that Trump’s immigration rating had flipped from 55% approval to 55% disapproval in the past year.
“On one side of the ledger, there is a decreasing sense that roundups and deportations by federal agents are focused on true security threats,” Anderson wrote. “On the other, there is rising anxiety that the presence of an armed federal force in cities is actively making daily life less safe for people who live there.” Notably, the economy and immigration were widely considered to be Trump’s winning issues in the 2024 election — the key reasons he prevailed over former Vice President Kamala Harris. Now that he’s lost his footing on those issues, his support within his party is ebbing back toward his most die-hard supporters, the ones who Trump famously boasted would support him even if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue. Given the way the Trump administration has tried to defend ICE acting as a secret police force with their approval, he’s probably right. But he doesn’t have anywhere close to the backing of the whole party on everything he wants to do. Trump’s de-escalation in Minnesota shows he knows this, and that he’s wary of burning too much political capital on any specific controversial operation. But he also probably overestimates his ability to recover the kind of support he briefly held around his election. The president’s growing unpopularity is a major opportunity for the pro-democracy coalition on the left to expand and contain Trump’s power. That could come in the form of persuading disenchanted Republicans to flip toward Democrats during the midterms, or building broader backing for protest movements against Trump’s assaults on democratic features of the country — many of which are surely yet to come.
Zeeshan Aleem is a writer and editor for MS NOW. He primarily writes about politics and foreign policy. 
