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President Donald Trump ends his first year back in power with an approval rating of just 36 percent, according to Gallup
Joe Sommerlad Wednesday 24 December 2025 17:05 GMT- Bookmark
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President Donald Trump’s job approval rating stands at just 36 percent in the latest Gallup poll, the joint-worst rating of any U.S. president at the end of their first year in power of the last 50 years.
The other man? Himself – at the end of the first year of his first term in December 2017 – when he picked up precisely the same score.
For comparison, his predecessor Joe Biden was at 43 percent at the end of his first year in the Oval Office in December 2021.
Looking further back, there is one president with a worse approval rating than Trump at the end of the first year of their second term, Richard Nixon, who scored 30 percent in December 1973.
However, the comparison is not exact as Nixon’s two terms were consecutive whereas Trump is the first American president to mount a successful comeback after defeat since Grover Cleveland in 1892.
open image in galleryPresident Donald Trump’s dire end-of-year approval rating is matched among recent presidents only by himself (AP)New York magazine notes that Trump began his belated second term in January with the highest job-approval rating he has ever scored as president, with Gallup placing him at 50 percent.
Silver Bulletin’s refined polling averages meanwhile placed him at 51.6 percent on the day after his second inauguration was held in the U.S. Capitol, an event driven indoors by bitter winter cold.
His disapproval rating at that time was 40 percent, leaving him with a positive net approval rating of 11.6 percent overall, a state of play that continued until March 12, at which point it slumped into negative territory and remained there for the rest of the year.
A significant slump occurred on April 2, the day Trump unveiled his “Liberation Day” program of reciprocal tariffs on other nations from the Rose Garden, which inspired such an adverse reaction from the markets that he was forced to pause the levies again a week later.
Silver Bulletin charts a subsequent recovery through June before his net approval rating began a steady downturn that hit -15 percent by Thanksgiving (41.2 percent approval against 56.2 percent disapproval).
A slight rally in December has brought him to -12.2 percent this Christmas, from 42.1 percent approval and 54.3 percent disapproval.
open image in galleryTrump’s unveiling of his ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs in the White House Rose Garden on April 2 marked the beginning of a significant decline in his approval ratings (Getty)Trump scores in negative territory in all four performance areas tracked by Silver Bulletin: immigration (-8.3 percent), trade (-20.5 percent), the economy (-21.3 percent), and inflation (-28.8 percent).
The president has consistently claimed the U.S. economy is in rude health, including during his primetime televised address last week and in Pennsylvania on the first stop of his “Affordability” tour but, judging by those figures, would be well-advised to think again about the problem.
While Gallup’s monthly polling of Republican voters shows only a 2 percent decline for Trump from January’s high of 91 percent approval to 89 percent now, among independents his support has almost halved from 46 percent at inauguration time to 25 percent.
That could be read as an ill omen for the GOP ahead of next year’s midterms, which are likely to serve as an effective referendum on his administration, even though the president himself will not be on the ballot.
Another recent survey conducted by Quinnipiac University found that a majority of American voters across all parties believe Trump has gone too far in his use of presidential power in his first year back in the Oval.
Fifty-four percent of respondents to the poll said they felt Trump had exceeded his authority while another 37 percent said they believed he had got the balance broadly right.
A further 7 percent said, perhaps surprisingly, that he had not gone far enough.
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