How Low Can Trump’s Approval Rating Go in 2026?

President Trump has potentially never been less popular than he is right now, the day that 3rd quarter GDP blew by expectations at 4.3% growth, the strongest quarterly figure in two years. A recent Gallup poll taken from December 1st to the 15th pegged Trump at 36% approval, nearly his lowest Gallup figure ever, second only to a poll taken from January 4th to 15th in 2021 that had him at 34%. Given that this year has seen Trump enact his agenda to the degree he sees fit—one that is at odds with pretty much the entire Constitution outside the vast Article II powers afforded to the president—it’s logical to ask whether he even has the ability to turn this around. We live in a disconnected world where the depraved elite are cheering on and funding Trump’s crime spree while the general populace is reacting in horror, and Trump is firmly ensconced in his right-wing propaganda safe space where he can do no wrong. Between putting the gestapo on American streets and disappearing people to foreign gulags, giving the gilded elite some more historic tax cuts, putting a crank in charge of HHS and destroying the foundation of American science, taking people’s healthcare away and enacting debunked 19th century economics, Trump has done most of what he promised to do this year, and it has led to a world where Congressional Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene are fleeing for the exits ahead of their 2026 elections. Reversing this polling freefall will require Trump to go against his own instincts, something America’s oldest toddler has proven himself incapable of even conceiving of.

Trump’s central problem is that economic sentiment among Americans is moving against the trend of economic growth, a diverging dynamic I have written about at length as long as the second iteration of Splinter has been alive. There is something far larger than presidential influence happening with people’s views of the economy since the pandemic shock of 2020, as both Joe Biden and Donald Trump have seen almost no political benefit to an economy growing out of a crisis far faster than its peers have. In a way it is heartening to see Trump whining about his polls on TruthSocial and know that a pure authoritarian project like this is still subservient to the whims of the electorate to some degree, which don’t always align with objective reality, or the one that the president is trying to invent. Now Trump is leaving 2025, an economy owned by Joe Biden as he has been saying all year until today’s 4.3% Q3 GDP print, and 2026 will be the Trump economy, one far more animated by noticeable price increases across the country.

Trump’s tariffs have begun to weave their way into the economy by way of things like producer indexes, and it is inevitable that these additional costs will be passed down to the consumer in the form of higher prices the same way that the pandemic supply shock led to elevated prices to this day. Capitalism has proven that once prices go up, it is very hard to get them to come back down. Even The Wall Street Journal admits that greedflation is real, they just think it’s a good thing (and from their macro-only perspective, it’s hard to argue that as our economy has over-performed our peers). We live in a new Gilded Age where people in different income buckets live very different lives, and this no doubt is at the root of the disconnect between economic data and economic sentiment. The economy simply does not work for everyone, and only a portion of the country is able to share in its spoils. While there is not enough data to back up the extremely pessimistic vibes, the cost of basic necessities is rising at the fastest rate in two decades, and Trump’s trade war has only exacerbated that problem. Now he’s getting his lowest marks ever on the economy in the latest AP-NORC poll (31%). Just 69% of Republicans approve of Trump’s handling of the economy, a trend revealed in other polling this year which exposed a gargantuan split between MAGA and non-MAGA Republicans on Trump’s trade war.

The price of groceries is at the forefront of Trump’s economic problems, something intimately tied to his trade war. Countries like China have proven in both Trump administrations that one of their prime pressure points they’re willing to use are American farmers and the $12+ billion per year in soybeans they buy from them, and this time around Trump was happy to throw them under the bus to help out Argentinian farmers, before being forced to give American farmers a billion-dollar bailout like he had to in 2018. The farm economy is in a recession right now, and prices of beef are at all-time highs as Trump publicly berates American cattle ranchers. There is no indication that president deals has any plan to provide Americans relief on one of their core concerns since the pandemic, because doing so would require reversing much of his trade war helping to push basic items like beef to all-time high prices because one of the countries we buy a bunch of beef from actually believes in jailing former presidents who try to stage coups.

The Affordable Care Act subsidies are going to expire at the end of the year too, jacking up monthly healthcare costs for tens of millions of Americans. People will die as a result of this decision by Republicans to let these credits expire that Democrats made an extension of their core ask in the government shutdown. The outline of the 2026 elections is already taking shape, and it looks very bad for Republicans, as the wave of 2025 special election victories for Democrats in deep red districts proved. If Trump thought economic sentiment was bad already, try telling people who just saw their monthly healthcare premium double that actually the economy is booming because seven companies and their subsidiaries are passing $100 billion back and forth to finance data center expansion and calling it growth. It has long been evident that productivity gains do not trickle down to wages in our capitalist system, and this assumption that a rising capitalist tide lifts all boats was the crucial mistake that Joe Biden made that Trump is now repeating. Just because topline economic figures improve does not mean that all of us get to share in that bounty. Capital has proven this year that the only thing they ever want in their miserable lives is more than they currently have.

And healthcare premiums aren’t the only attack Trump plans to wage on people’s wallets next year. There are currently five million student loan borrowers in default, and that number could increase to ten million soon. Beginning the second week of January, Trump’s Education Department will begin to garnish those people’s wages. Millions of people will feel a vice grip ratcheting up on their lives, being forced to pay more for absolute basics like healthcare and food, all while the federal government takes money out of their pockets before it even reaches them. Add in Trump’s insistence that the next Fed governor drop rates dramatically in his bid to try to repeat the worst mistakes of the 1970s, and inflation could come roaring back next year just due to bad monetary policy alone. This fear is why Jerome Powell has not dropped rates dramatically this year, backed up by months of data that trends towards stagflation. There are far more tail risks out there than the economy is presently pricing in, and many of them come straight from the Oval Office.

The economic forecasts for 2026 are a bit all over the place, but they are generally rosy, while the lone broad-based agreement is that there will be more uncertainty which could lead to more volatile swings. If we get a surprise to the downside, the stock market planning for new all-time highs could take a real hit. This would affect consumer spending because it is more dependent on America’s wealthiest denizens than ever, the group of people most benefiting from the stock market’s wealth effect. Even with a good economy in 2026, sentiment it not likely to change, and with the ACA expiration imposing a huge new cost on tens of millions of people, people’s feelings on the economy are likelier to keep deteriorating no matter what the Q4 GDP print returns.

Which all begs the question: how much more unpopular can Trump get? We’re basically already at his proven floor after January 6th, and he is getting his worst marks ever on an economy that’s holding up pretty well! Yet he now sits six points underwater with all white people, per Gallup’s newest poll. He’s ten points underwater with people aged 55 and over, and is a staggering 43 points underwater with 18- to 34-year-olds, the cohort that helped win him a popular vote victory just last year. If you think that is just the capriciousness of youth manifesting itself in polling, Trump is at the exact same approval and disapproval ratings with Independents too (25% to 68%).

It is stunning to look at Trump’s polling—it’s a complete and total collapse where only the most devoted cult members remain just 11 months in. Longtime bad faith actors on the right like Candace Owens clearly smell blood in the water, and she is fracturing the GOP base with conspiracies about who killed Charlie Kirk as the GOP becomes more rudderless by the day. The Epstein documents aren’t getting any less incriminating, and his idiots at the Department of Justice proved they’re not even capable of fully redacting the documents, all while Trump’s chief apparatchik he installed at CBS News just turned the entire organization against her by violating 60 Minutes‘ journalistic sovereignty. Bari Weiss, the administration’s chief propagandist in the mainstream media and soothsayer to the weak gilded elite who just want to have their fragile egos flattered, hilariously embarrassed herself this past week and proved to the whole journalistic world that she doesn’t know shit about fuck, all while letting the story that she was trying to kill about Trump’s concentration camps still get out because she’s vastly unqualified to do her job. This amateur hour fascist takeover is all likely to get far more shambolic for Trump before it gets any more coherent.

Republicans can scream about the fake news polls all they want, but this year-long deterioration in his polling is all backed up by special elections as well as resignations from the vastly influential Heritage Foundation and a Republican Congress filled with rats fleeing a sinking ship. Politicians do not tend to retire from offices they fully expect to hold two years from now. Many of Trump’s allies are not acting like people expecting a hundred-year Republican trifecta, or even a four year one. Unless something dramatic changes next year, Republicans will very likely lose the narrowest House majority in a century, while Larry Sabato’s famed crystal ball forecast characterizes the Senate race with just 51 favored GOP seats and 4 toss ups. What has long been identified as a very friendly map for Republicans is just one surprise in a state like Nebraska, Iowa and Texas from creating a 50-50 Senate come 2027, and two surprises from doing the unthinkable and giving the Democrats control of the Senate in a year where even the toss-ups take place in theoretically friendly GOP territory (Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina and Maine).

If there is one thing the age of Trump has taught us, it’s that predicting the future is a fool’s errand, but there are salient lessons we have learned in this post-2020 era. Economic sentiment is detached from economic data regardless of which party is in power, and neither one has figured out how convince the public that they can address their most important concern of living an affordable life. This has led to a yo-yo government where ‘throw the bums out’ is the only vote a controlling plurality of the populace casts every two to four years. Trump and company benefited from this dynamic last year, but if 2025 is any indication, they have no idea that this predictable pendulum is swinging against them now that they are in power. It’s anyone’s guess how low Trump’s approval rating could go given current trends, but I firmly believe that if we were to slip into a recession in 2026, the high teens are very much in range.