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THE CONSENT OF THE GOVERNED HAS BEEN WITHDRAWN  
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G. Elliott Morris
January 23, 2026
Strength in Numbers
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_ One year into his second term, Trump has suffered the largest
approval collapse of any modern president (except the one who resigned
in disgrace). He is underwater on every major policy area. _

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One year ago this week, Donald Trump was sworn in as the 47th
President of the United States. He entered office with a net approval
rating of +5 in the FiftyPlusOne.news [[link removed]] approval
rating aggregate. Despite a tumultuous first term — which ended with
the president posting his worst-ever numbers after the January 6
insurrection — voters, it seemed, were willing to give him another
shot.

They are no longer willing to give him that chance. Trump sits at an
-16 net job approval
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down from +5 on his first day in office. His 21-point drop is the
worst first-year performance, in the eyes of public opinion, of any
president’s first term going back to at least 1948. If you compare
the last year to other second-term presidencies, Trump’s is still
the worst first-year performance of any president in the modern
polling, with one exception: Richard Nixon (who was consumed by
Watergate and other national crises
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at this point in his term).

Either way, Trump is in historically bad company.

As _The New York Times_ reported
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this week, Trump’s support among key groups he persuaded to vote for
him in 2024 — notably, young, Black, and Latino voters — has now
sunk below levels measured in the run-up to the 2020 election (which
Trump lost to Joe Biden by 4.5 points in the national popular vote):

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The president has lost the most ground among the groups that put him
back in the White House.

This week’s Chart of the Week: Trump’s historic approval collapse,
in context.

 
I. THE WORST-RATED PRESIDENT EVER, EXCEPT FOR WATERGATE-ERA NIXON

 
In absolute terms, a -16 approval rating is bad — but to understand
how bad that is, you have to put it in historical perspective.
Treating Trump, for now, as a first-term president, you can see he is
matched at his low rating only by himself in 2017:

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If you want to treat Trump as a second-term president, use the graph
below. I calculated the net approval ratings for every second-term
president since Dwight Eisenhower at their inauguration and one year
later.

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Among the seven presidents who won a second term, only Nixon
experienced a larger drop in his first year back. Nixon fell 54 net
approval points as the Watergate scandal unraveled — from +24 at his
1973 inauguration to -30 a year later. He would resign about seven
months after that.

Trump’s 21-point decline puts him in second place on this list,
worse than:

* GEORGE W. BUSH (2005): Started at +5, ended year one at -11. A
16-point drop as Iraq deteriorated and Hurricane Katrina exposed
administration incompetence.
* BARACK OBAMA (2013): Started at +9, ended at -11. A 19-point drop
amid the botched Obamacare rollout.
* DWIGHT EISENHOWER (1957): Started at +60, ended at +32. A 28-point
drop, though he remained popular in absolute terms.

What makes Trump’s collapse notable is not just its magnitude (we
have known the man was unpopular for the better part of a decade now!)
but its trajectory. While it is the historical trend, presidents are
not destined to get more unpopular as time goes on. Reagan and Clinton
actually improved their standing in year one of their second terms —
Reagan gained 6 points, Clinton gained 2. Trump moved in the opposite
direction, and he started from a much weaker position than either of
them.

II. BAD PRIORITIES, UNPOPULAR POLICIES

Trump’s numbers are historically bad because he is focusing on the
wrong problems and enacting unpopular policies. As I noted on Sunday,
the polls
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show voters think he is focused on the wrong issues, and he is paying
a steep price for bad prioritization.

Last week, CNN and SSRS
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reported that just 36% of adults think Trump has the right priorities,
down from 45% when he took office. 64% of Americans said he wasn’t
focusing enough on high prices — something 74%
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with in a separate poll from CBS News and YouGov.

But even where he has focused his attention, voters don’t like the
policies Trump is giving them. According to my average, Trump’s
approval on the economy collapsed from +10 at inauguration to -15
today — a 26-point swing. On inflation, the drop was even steeper:
from +6 to -24, a decline of 31 points. Even immigration —
supposedly Trump’s signature strength — went from +9 to -7.

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But even on immigration/deportations and tariffs, where voters think
Trump has spent too much energy, people still don’t like what
they’re getting! Trump’s immigration approval just hit a new
all-time low in my average, and his approval on handling deportations
is approaching the low levels from last summer. Voters are now balking
at the administration’s use of force in immigration enforcement
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and left-leaning policies like abolishing ICE are more popular than
they’ve ever been.

On health care, voters are similarly disapproving of Trump. His
approval rating on health care has slid to -12, driven by concerns
over Obamacare cuts and continually rising hospital costs On trade,
tariffs that were supposed to bring back manufacturing jobs have
instead led to 73,000 job losses
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everyday goods. Because he has retreated somewhat from these tariffs,
Trump has recovered from a -20 rating on trade last May to -15 today.
But that’s still down almost 30 points from the start of his
administration.

On foreign policy, Trump is at -10 today, also down 20 points from the
start of his administration. And his recent actions will likely move
the needle more against him. A January Economist/YouGov poll
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found just 9% of Americans support the U.S. “using military force to
take control of Greenland.” Nine percent. For context, roughly the
same share of Americans believe the moon landing was faked
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It is really hard to find anything good for Trump in these numbers.
The pattern is consistent across every issue: voters asked Trump to
lower prices and secure the U.S. border, and instead he’s made
prices worse and enacted a much more ambitious deportations agenda
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than the one sanctioned by voters. Elsewhere, he has ignored voters
entirely in order to pursue pet projects that nobody asked for, and to
enrich himself at taxpayers’ expense
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III. WHY IT MATTERS THAT TRUMP IS UNPOPULAR

There’s a tendency online to suggest that Trump doesn’t care about
public opinion, so why does any of this matter? For one thing, I’m
not so sure he doesn’t care what the public thinks. The president
routinely highlights polls when they favor him (rarely) and — more
often — simply makes up numbers to pretend Americans agree with his
actions. A man who didn’t care about public opinion wouldn’t spend
so much energy lying about it. The lady doth protest too much,
methinks.

But even if Trump were genuinely indifferent to the polls, _we_ should
not be. The Framers designed our political system on the radical idea
that the government derives its “just powers from the consent of the
governed.” Jefferson wrote those words in 1776, and they remain the
bedrock of our country’s democratic legitimacy. Public opinion
polling is how we measure that consent — and, as I argued in my book
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polls have the responsibility to act as a pipeline from the governed
to the government, giving citizens influence they would otherwise
lack.

The Framers understood this tension between executive power and public
accountability, which is why they designed a system of checks against
it.

Making this more relevant to Trump now: The Framers were also very
worried about executive overreach, thus their design of a government
with separate branches sharing powers. In Federalist No. 70
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Hamilton argued that a single executive would be “more narrowly
watched and more readily suspected” by citizens than a diffuse
council — accountability was the safeguard against tyranny. Madison
put it more starkly in Federalist No. 47
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“The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive, and
judiciary in the same hands... may justly be pronounced the very
definition of tyranny.” They made elections to Congress more
frequent than presidential elections so the legislature could check an
out-of-control executive.

Looking back on a year of Trump 2.0, what we see is a president acting
against the wishes of the governed at nearly every opportunity. That
gap between what Trump does and what Americans want is the central
question at the heart of our democracy. When leaders govern against
the clear preferences of the people, repeatedly and with great cost to
the average American, the social contract is violated.

When presidents roundly position themselves on the wrong side of 60-40
and 70-30 issues, they usually suffer in the form of lost political
capital and electoral defeat. Trump knows what he’s doing has cost
him, that’s why he’s “making jokes” about canceling the
midterms. He knows if an election were held today, his party would
lose.

In 2024, facing serious affordability problems (and buying a lot of
misinformation about Trump’s first term and Biden/Harris’s
record), Americans gave Trump another chance to fix their problems.
The numbers show they now regret that choice. In the eyes of the
voters, Trump 2.0 has been a failure. And while that might not matter
to him, it should matter to us.

_G. Elliott Morris_ [[link removed]]_ is a data
driven journalist and author of Strength in Numbers. I write about
politics, public opinion and elections using facts and math._
_Strength In Numbers_ [[link removed]]_ is a data-driven
news website covering U.S. politics, elections, and public opinion.
The mission here is simple: to help you be smarter about politics and
the news using empirical analysis based on hard data — not
speculation, conventional wisdom, or “vibes.”_
_The Friday edition of Strength In Numbers is free to all readers. If
you’d like to support data-driven political journalism and get
deep-dive analysis every Tuesday, __become a paying subscriber today_
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fund interactive data projects, __like this one_
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* Donald Trump
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* public opinion
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