Donald Trump won his second term on a single promise: he would fix the economy. Inflation had battered the American working class under Biden. Groceries were expensive. Gas was painful. The message was simple — the Democrats broke it, Trump would fix it.
Eighteen months later, Trump's approval rating sits at 34% in Pew Research polling. His net approval is -19 points — worse than Biden at the same stage, worse than Trump himself during his first term. Among independents, the voters who handed him his second victory, approval has collapsed to 22%. In seven states, the price of regular gasoline now exceeds five dollars a gallon.
The man who ran on making life affordable has presided over some of the sharpest cost-of-living increases in a generation. Understanding how he got here is not a partisan exercise. It is a case study in how policy decisions, made at the top, land at the kitchen table.
The Promise and the Coalition
Trump's 2024 coalition was not simply the MAGA base. It expanded. He made meaningful gains with working-class Latino voters, with young men, with union households in the Rust Belt who had never voted Republican before. These were not ideological converts. They were economically frustrated voters making a transactional bet: that Trump's business instincts would translate into cheaper groceries and cheaper gas.
The bet reflected a real grievance. Bidenomics had produced genuine growth, but the inflation surge of 2021-2023 left deep psychological scars. People remembered what things cost before and what they cost after. When Trump promised to bring prices down on day one, millions of Americans believed him — not because they trusted him entirely, but because the alternative had visibly failed them.
That transactional coalition is now breaking. And it is breaking precisely on the transaction they thought they had made.
The Tariff Trap
The first major policy decision that began unwinding Trump's economic credibility was the tariff agenda — the centerpiece of his economic vision and the first thing that hit ordinary Americans in the wallet.
Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on nearly all major trading partners, framing them as a tool to revive American manufacturing, raise federal revenue, and punish countries that had taken advantage of the US for decades. The pitch was nationalist and emotionally resonant. The economic mechanics were something else.
Tariffs are taxes. Not on foreign governments — on American importers, who pass the cost to American consumers. The Tax Foundation estimates Trump's tariffs amounted to an average tax increase of $1,000 per US household in 2025, rising to $1,500 per household in 2026. The effective tariff rate hit its highest level since 1947. The Federal Reserve noted the effects on consumer prices were "clearly visible."
The goods that got most expensive were the ones working-class households buy most: clothing, electronics, household appliances, food products dependent on imported inputs.
The manufacturing renaissance Trump promised has not materialized at any scale that offsets these costs. What materialized instead was a price increase on the things people already owned and needed to replace. In February 2026, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the executive authority Trump had used to impose the broadest tariffs was unconstitutional, forcing a partial rollback. But by then, the inflationary psychology was already embedded. Prices that rise rarely fall at the same speed.
Five Dollars a Gallon
Gas prices deserve their own section because they are uniquely politically toxic.
Unlike abstract inflation statistics, the price at the pump is visible, impossible to avoid, and updated daily. Every American who drives — which is nearly every American — sees it multiple times a week. It is the most visceral measure of economic pain in the country, and it is the one Trump was most explicit about fixing.
Two factors drove this. First, the tariff regime raised costs across the energy supply chain — drilling equipment, refinery components, transportation infrastructure — all of which feed into what consumers pay at the pump. Second, and more significantly, the Iran war.
When the US military launched operations against Iran in late February 2026, oil markets responded immediately. Iran sits on one of the world's largest proven oil reserves and controls the Strait of Hormuz — the chokepoint through which roughly 20 percent of global oil supply passes. Even the threat of disruption in that corridor moves oil prices sharply. Actual military operations moved them dramatically.
The political irony is almost too neat: Trump ran promising cheap energy. The Iran war — his own decision — is one of the primary drivers of the most expensive gas Americans have seen in years. Pew Research found that higher gas prices are now Americans' top concern about the Iran war, ranking above fears of ground troops, military casualties, and terrorist attacks on US soil.
The Iran War Nobody Wanted
The Iran conflict deserves direct examination because it is the policy decision that most clearly illustrates the gap between Trump's instincts and the public he governs.
Sixty percent of Americans oppose the war. That figure is historically remarkable. Opposition to the Iraq War reached similar levels — but it took three years to get there. Opposition to the Vietnam War took six years to reach 61 percent, and that was during a draft. Trump's Iran war hit those numbers within two months of operations beginning.
The opposition cuts across party lines. Democrats and independents oppose it overwhelmingly. But the more significant story is the fracture within Trump's own coalition. Only 15 percent of Americans support sending ground troops into Iran. Even among Republicans, opposition to ground troops outweighs support. Tucker Carlson — once the most prominent media voice for Trumpism — has been sharply critical. Marjorie Taylor Greene broke publicly with the administration over the war.
Wars are sustainable when the public understands what they are for. This one hasn't cleared that threshold — 58% of Americans say they either don't understand Trump's objectives in Iran or don't understand them at all.
The absence of a compelling justification has compounded the problem. When the US entered World War II, Pearl Harbor provided the narrative. When it entered Iraq, September 11 provided the emotional frame, however misleadingly applied. Trump's Iran war began without a comparable catalyzing event. Most Americans — 55 percent in a March 2026 Marist poll — view Iran as a minor threat or no threat at all.
The Coalition Math
The polling breakdown tells the structural story of what is happening to Trump's political position.
Among independents — the voters who decide competitive elections — approval has fallen from 31 percent in early March to 22 percent in the most recent wave. That is a nine-point collapse in under three months among the single most important demographic for the 2026 midterms. Competitive House and Senate races are decided by independent turnout. A president sitting at 22 percent approval with independents is a liability to every Republican candidate in a swing district.
The damage is generational too. Among Americans aged 18-34, Trump's approval has dropped 12 points from February. Among 35-49 year olds, 14 points. Among seniors, 14 points to 39 percent. Among lower-income Americans making under $50,000 a year — the economic constituency most affected by inflation and gas prices — approval has fallen from 45 percent in February to 31 percent today. This is the precise demographic Trump was supposed to protect. These are the voters who believed the transaction.
The Structural Problem
The deeper issue is not any single policy. It is a mismatch between what Trump promised and what the levers of presidential power can actually deliver in the short term.
Inflation is a complex, multi-variable phenomenon. Presidents get blamed for it because they are visible and powerful, but they control relatively few of the mechanisms that drive prices at the consumer level. Supply chains, Federal Reserve policy, global commodity markets, geopolitical disruptions — these are the actual drivers of what Americans pay for food and fuel. A president can influence some of these things at the margins, but cannot reliably command them.
Trump made a political promise — prices will come down — that economics was never guaranteed to keep. When the promise was not kept, and when his own decisions actively made some prices worse, the voters who made a transactional bet on him drew the only logical conclusion: the transaction failed.
What compounds the problem is the rhetorical trap Trump built for himself. His entire political brand is competence and deals. He does not have the ideological reservoir that sustained Reagan through early economic difficulty or the foreign policy credibility that sustained Bush after September 11. His brand is results. When the results are record disapproval and five-dollar gas, the brand takes direct damage.
The Bottom Line
Trump's approval collapse is not simply a story about a president being unpopular. It is a story about a specific political contract being broken with the specific voters who signed it.
The working-class coalition that gave him his second term did not vote for ideology. They voted for cheaper groceries, cheaper gas, and a return to the economic conditions of his first term. What they got instead was the highest tariff regime since 1947, gas prices up nearly a dollar a gallon in twelve months, an unpopular war that is actively making energy more expensive, and a cost-of-living that 40 percent of Americans say is worse than a year ago.
Pew Research now records that only 38 percent of Americans believe Trump "keeps his promises" — down from 51 percent at the moment of his re-election. That single number captures what is happening more precisely than any approval rating.
He ran on the promise. The promise is what's collapsing.