Name: Is Donald Trump losing public support? | BBC News
Uploaded: 2025-05-03T00:10:46.000Z
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I hope you've managed to catch our series, 100 Days of Donald Trump.

If you haven't heard it, or you haven't heard every episode, they are all available on BBC Sounds or wherever you get your podcasts.

What does the man himself think of his first 100 days of his second term?

It was at a rally in Michigan on Tuesday.

And we're here tonight in the heartland of our nation to celebrate the most successful first 100 days of any administration in the history of our country, and that's according to many, many people.

This is the best, they say, 100-day start of any president in history, and everyone is saying it.

But for all the great things he says he's done, for all the things he is promising in the immediate future, it is a simple fact that his approval ratings in the American public seem to be dropping, and that particularly because of the things he has done on the economy.

Hello, this is Sarah, and I'm in the BBC's bureau in Washington.

And it's Anthony, I'm right here next to Sarah in Washington.

And it's Justin in the worldwide headquarters of AmeriCast in London, England.

And we are talking to you at three o'clock in the afternoon,

And I say that right at the start because, as we know, things happen very fast.

So who knows what we will need to talk about in the days and hours ahead.

But anyway, this is a snapshot at any rate of what's going on at the moment.

And let us begin with that Michigan rally that Donald Trump held.

So the first 100 days in office, that's the clip of the rally that you heard in the pre-intro there.

Yes, I went up there because that was the first rally he's had since he returned to the White House.

And I'll tell you what was fascinating was, although the Trump supporters who were there were really, really enthusiastic, absolutely delighted to get to see him in campaign mode once again, it wasn't that busy.

There were not queues running around the block hours before the doors opened, like we saw during the campaign.

There were empty seats inside the auditorium.

It just didn't quite have the size and the scale of the events that we all went to during the election.

I guess that isn't a huge surprise, right?

I mean, the enthusiasms of campaigns get everyone really engaged.

And they had one singular focus that they had, and that was unseating the Democrats from the White House.

Now, Republicans are being pulled in a bunch of different directions.

And perhaps there's some concern about the direction that Donald Trump is taking the country.

And I thought, you know, there were plenty of the hallmarks in the performance, in the whole speech of classic Donald Trump.

He kind of meandered off into places that his speechwriter certainly would have been surprised that he got to, etc., etc.

All the kind of, all the things that we're really used to.

There are a couple of things that were interesting, particularly, I thought.

And one of them was this focus on the polls, because that does go, doesn't it, to whether he is or is not genuinely in the mood to change now as a result of what seems to be his growing unpopularity.

So among the very many enemies he brought up, and Joe Biden was there and all the rest of it,

Bernie Sanders even made it on, although he's not much of a threat to Donald Trump in the modern political era.

It was really interesting that it was the polls that he took issue with.

And that's why we got, despite the fake polls, you know, they do these polls where they interview far more Democrats than Republicans.

I saw them over the last few days and I had them checked out.

They interview far more Democrats for the polls.

They interview Democrats by big numbers and then Republicans by small.

They say Trump only has a 44% approval rating.

But when you figure that if it were a legit poll, it would be in the 60s or 70s.

These people are a bunch of crooked people.

Well, I'm not sure which poll he's referring to here.

It might be the Reuters-Ipsos poll, which showed him with an approval rating in the low 40s.

And actually an approval in his handling of the economy, which used to be a strength for Donald Trump in the 30s.

But it wasn't just that poll that has shown Donald Trump dip in his approval.

And, you know, polls vary by their methodology.

And I think the interesting thing to take from these polls is that they do show a trend where Donald Trump was higher.

He was even had a net positive approval rate in some of these polls.

And not all of them are moving to net negative.

But, you know, I can understand why Donald Trump would say, these polls are meaningless, they're fake, because we saw polls, as we've all discussed, in the run up to the 2024 presidential election that showed Kamala Harris may be narrowly ahead.

And then Donald Trump ended up winning reasonably comfortably.

So it's understandable that he might treat this with a bit of skepticism and also understandable that he's worried that if people start believing these polls, it will undermine his political authority and power and ability to get things done.

Because by some measures in these polls, he's got actually historically low approval ratings.

The ABC News Washington Post poll that found just 39% of Americans approving of his performance, that put him at the lowest point at this point in a presidential term of anybody for 80 years.

And the second lowest was Donald Trump in his first term.

What I found really fascinating about this is, so for one thing, a lot of these polls have tiny numbers of people who voted for Donald Trump saying that they regret it, like 4%, 6% in some polls.

So you've got more than half the country voted for him.

More than half the country think that he's not doing a good job.

But very, very few people say that they would vote differently if they could have a do-over in November.

And I mean, non-scientifically, completely anecdotally,

I phoned back a few Trump voters that I met during the course of the campaign last year.

And I spoke to a bunch of folks in Michigan when we quite deliberately visited a county that had voted for Donald Trump to find people who'd voted for him.

And everyone I spoke to was pretty enthusiastic about how he was doing.

Certainly wouldn't have changed their mind.

And if there were things that they had trouble with, like somewhere unsure about whether the tariffs would really work out, they said, give it some time.

Nobody could fix the economy in that amount of time.

So, I mean, of course, science versus anecdote.

Obviously, you would go with the bigger, more scientifically weighted polls.

But just my personal experience is there doesn't seem to be that much buyer's remorse from Trump voters.

Yeah, I think Donald Trump's base, we have seen, will stick with him.

And they very reluctantly second-guess things that he's done.

I mean, he has that 30 to 40% of the American public that will ride and die with him.

So that's going to be his floor, I think.

And then it's a matter of how many other people, independents, Democrats, he can get to be on his side.

And he certainly won enough of those in last year's presidential election, the only poll that really matters, to get the presidency, get the White House back.

But I think it's perception that is the danger here.

Because Republicans, unlike Donald Trump, are going to have to stand for a re-election next year.

There are even some in state races that will have to stand for re-election this November.

And if they start feeling like Donald Trump is not popular, and that he's pulling them down, that's when you will see them start to break from the president.

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Is Donald Trump losing public support? | BBC News

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