Thirty-three percent. That’s where Donald Trump’s approval sits right now, according to Reuters/Ipsos. Sixty-four percent disapprove. Those are the worst numbers of his entire presidency, tied with the low he hit back in December 2017 when nobody could figure out what the White House was doing either.
Here’s the number that actually matters, though. Fifty-three percent of registered voters told a Financial Times poll they’re worse off financially since Trump took office in January 2025. Not since Biden. Since *Trump*. Fifty-seven percent of independents say it. And nearly a quarter of Republicans. The people who voted for this man are standing in the grocery aisle looking at ground beef that’s up 12 percent and thinking, wait a minute.
Quinnipiac came out with its own survey the same week. Their findings are just as ugly. Forty-nine percent of voters say they’re worse off than a year ago. Seventy-one percent call the economy “not so good” or “poor.” Fifty-nine percent say it’s getting worse. Eighty-eight percent call inflation a serious problem. Gasoline is up 27 percent. The national average hit $4.10 a gallon. Coffee up 16 percent. Milk up 7 percent. Electricity up 4 percent. Every single thing you touch, eat, or pour has gotten more expensive while your paycheck buys less.
Real wages declined. The economy shed 23,000 jobs last month. And what did Trump say? He celebrated that the economy is “doing unbelievably from the standpoint of Wall Street.”
127driver (CC BY-SA 4.0) via Wikimedia CommonsWall Street. There it is. One sentence and the mask comes off.
The stock market is soaring. Your 401(k) might look decent on paper if you still have one. But the people who actually work for a living, the people who pump their own gas and grind their own coffee and count the dollars in their wallet, are getting cleaned out. And the guy who promised them he’d fix it is bragging about how great things are for the people who already had money.
Then there’s the war. Trump launched a conflict with Iran that he said would be over in weeks. It’s now approaching its sixth month. Two-thirds of voters in the Quinnipiac poll say it hasn’t been worth fighting. Sixty percent oppose the military action outright. Only 36 percent think the United States is winning. Pete Hegseth went before the Senate Appropriations Committee and told them the Pentagon’s own cost estimate is $37.5 billion, and the administration wants another $67 billion on top of that.
Sixty-seven billion. For a war nobody wants, that was supposed to last weeks, that has driven oil prices through the roof and made your gas cost four bucks a gallon. You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to ask who benefits from that. The defense contractors benefit. The oil companies benefit. Wall Street benefits. You pay for it at the pump and you pay for it on April 15.
WeatherWriter (BY-SA) via wikimediaEven Trump’s base is cracking. Economist/YouGov had his Republican approval at 79 percent, a second-term low. Strong approval, the people who actually feel it in their bones, dropped from 68 percent at the start of the term to 48 percent now. Quinnipiac shows Republican approval down nine points in five weeks, from 85 to 76. Sixty-eight percent of all voters say Trump isn’t focused enough on the problems they face.
Four in five Americans, including 71 percent of Republicans, think the war will drag on “for a long time.” These are the people who believed him when he said weeks. Now they know better.
The establishment always wins this game. They sell you a candidate who talks like he’s one of you, and the minute the votes are counted, Wall Street gets the party and you get the bill. The stock market hits records. Your wages shrink. A war starts that was supposed to be quick and turns into a budget line item bigger than most state budgets. And the president stands there talking about how unbelievable things are.
For somebody. Not for you.