April 29, 2025, 12:22 p.m.
President Trump has been in office for 100 years so far in his second term. OK, so it’s only 100 days, but there hasn’t been a quiet news cycle yet. Maybe we should start counting in dog years: 100 days is about two dog years, which seems like a far more logical time frame for all that has happened.
As is tradition, just about every public poll in existence has released a 100-days poll. I had speculated a few weeks ago that Trump doesn’t really care much about public opinion any more, but he did launch a tirade of a Truth Social post yelling about pollsters being “Negative Criminals”—whatever that means—and claiming he’s at “99.9% at the border,” which makes no sense even in context, so good luck figuring out what he’s trying to say.
To state the obvious, pollsters aren’t criminals, and the only person making up numbers here is Trump. He’s mad because literally every single poll is pretty rough for him. After starting the term with some decent numbers compared to his first stint in office, he has now dipped below where he was 100 days into his first term. Not only that, but as multiple headlines pointed out, he is below where any president has been at this point in his term in the entire polling era—which dates back to about 1945.
Taking all of these polls together, you get a picture of an already unpopular president who’s floundering on the economy but doing a little better on immigration (although not 99.9 percent better). Democrats hate him, Republicans like him, and independents skew about 60-40 in the negative direction. As long as Republican voters are still lined up behind their leader, there is little reason to think Trump will make any course corrections or the Republican congressional majorities will start to challenge him. These polls are bad, but not if your chief constituency is Republicans.
That said, there are some interesting tidbits in these polls that could signal a softening of Republican support. It’s not developed yet—there is even more evidence that they are still firmly behind Trump—but as a pollster and strategist, I would find a handful of numbers concerning if I was on their team.
An AP headline says that only about half of Republicans think Trump is focused on the right priorities. That probably got under his skin a little. Scroll down, and you learn that figure is 54 percent. Only 13 percent say Trump is focused on the wrong priorities, though; 26 percent say he’s focused on an even mix of right and wrong priorities. Not exactly a ringing endorsement from his own side.
Trump should be wary about running roughshod over Congress. In the CBS News-YouGov poll, 30 percent of Republicans say Trump should rely on executive orders to change federal regulations, while 70 percent say he should work with Congress to pass laws. Forty percent say Republicans in Congress should do whatever Trump wants, while the majority say Republicans in Congress should push back when they disagree.
The New York Times-Siena poll shows that a majority of Republicans—57 percent—say Trump’s policies haven’t made any difference in their lives yet; only 36 percent say his policies have helped. Nearly half of Republicans say the word “chaotic” describes the term so far, although you could spin that as positive if chaos is what’s needed to bring about change. But there’s really no way to positively spin the fact that 36 percent of Republicans say “scary” describes the term so far. At the same time, a 71 percent majority do say they think Trump’s policies will help them over the next four years, so they are still giving him time to improve things.
Republicans are also bought into Trump’s "short-term pain for long-term gain" tariff strategy. According to the CNN-SSRS poll, 47 percent of Republicans say tariffs will hurt the economy in the immediate future—only 27 percent say they will help—but 74 percent say tariffs will help in the long term. A mere 23 percent of Republicans say that Trump’s policies have reduced their cost of living, although again, the vast majority believe he will help them eventually.
We’ll see what happens when more businesses follow Amazon’s quickly walked-back plan to tell consumers exactly how much the tariffs raise prices. Trump isn’t buddies with all business owners like he is with Jeff Bezos, and others will certainly communicate with consumers about tariff impacts.
Trump doesn’t have to run for office again—despite his trolling about 2028—so other than a few ranting Truth Social posts, he likely doesn’t care what the broader electorate thinks. But even his own voters are watching and waiting for help on the cost of living.
Contributing editor Natalie Jackson is a vice president at GQR Research.
