President Donald Trump’s approval rating has sunk to 37%, the lowest point of his second term, according to Monday’s New York Times/Siena poll, and since we’ve seen his ratings dip before, experts feel confident in predicting what will come next. “In my observation, the Trump administration’s approach is fundamentally improvisational rather than bound by an overarching strategy,” Dino Christenson, a professor of political science at Washington University, told HuffPost. “The prevailing approach is simply to downplay unfavorable metrics or sow distrust in public data, reflecting
a high degree of spontaneity, personal loyalty, and visceral, emotional reactions.” Fifty-nine percent of polled voters disapprove of how Trump is handling his role as president, with 49% strongly disapproving of his job performance. Driving the low ratings is widespread dissatisfaction with the administration’s foreign and domestic policies: Nearly two-thirds of the voters in the poll said that going to war with Iran was the wrong decision, while 64% of voters disapprove of how Trump is handling the economy, and 70% disapprove of how he’s
handling the cost of living. Monday’s poll results are three points lower compared to the last New York Times/Siena poll from January. The poll was conducted from May 11 to May 15 and was based on responses from 1,507 registered voters nationwide, according to The New York Times. (The poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.) Trump has not publicly commented on his low approval rating, as of reporting. When faced with bad news in the past, Trump and
his administration typically followed a two-part playbook: discrediting data as “fake” on Truth Social, then flooding the news cycle to pull mainstream media attention elsewhere. Doug Kriner, a professor in American institutions at Cornell University, described Trump’s usual publicity tactic in the aftermath of bad news as one of “misdirection” — a deliberate effort to move the news cycle onto more controlled terrain. Flooding the media with different news stories and polarizing opinions leads more people to tune out politics entirely due to feeling overwhelmed,
journalist Jude Joffe-Block reported for NPR in January. “We’re talking about one thing, and then he’ll do something or more likely sometimes say something, just to change the narrative and get it onto something else,” Kriner told HuffPost. “The news cycle goes in a direction he doesn’t like, and then he uses the power of his social media feed, and everyone’s infatuation with his social media feed, to make us talk about something different.” The pattern appeared to hold on Monday morning. After the approval
poll came out, Trump withdrew his $10 billion lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service, and the Trump administration announced a $1.776 billion fund to compensate people who claim the Biden Justice Department targeted them. Trump has faced low approval ratings in the past. The president dismissed his low December 2025 approval ratings in a post on Truth Social, claiming the polls were “rigged.” He posted an image claiming that “over 50% of voters approve” of his presidency, sourcing the Trafalgar Group, a polling firm that
critics and competing pollsters have accused of bias. “Trump has a pretty standard playbook at this point,” Kriner said. “He cherry-picks [polls] he likes and calls the other ones fake.” Trump’s approval ratings averaged between 36% and 39% in December 2025, according to Gallup and The Economist/YouGov poll. Voters were dissatisfied with Trump’s handling of cost-of-living issues and jobs, as well as the recent 43-day government shutdown, which involved healthcare, and discussions around the Epstein files, which were released in batches on Nov. 14 and
Dec. 23. A November 2025 study by researcher Andrew J. Peterson found that Trump’s Truth Social posting patterns measurably shifted during the Epstein file releases, with the messaging deviating from his usual content in ways that were consistent with him trying to redirect public attention — though Peterson stopped short of claiming to measure intent. “He doesn’t reverse course rhetorically,” Andrew Rudalevige, a professor of government with an emphasis on modern presidency at Bowdoin University, told HuffPost. “He communicates so much so often at such
a high level of outrage that he doesn’t really have a lot of tunes in minor key.” Trump’s all-time low approval rating was 34% at the end of his first term in 2021, following the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, according to Gallup. Trump did not formally comment on the approval rating but during his final weeks shifted his public focus more toward challenging the 2020 election results. “With everything else he’s doing [right now], [the approval rating] is kind of getting upstaged,” Rudalevige
said. “But it takes a lot to get through to him until he actually responds to something that’s necessary to respond to or react to.” As for the concerns Americans have that affect his approval ratings, Kriner says he does not recall a time when Trump made changes to address them. The timing is also important. Kriner also questions whether the president has any incentive to take the numbers seriously, given significant MAGA wins in Louisiana and Indiana over the last month. “I don’t think
we’re going to see any real change here with the president,” Kriner said. “He’s not loyal to any of those individuals — what matters is they’re loyal to him, and not vice versa.” Trump’s Republican support still provides political cover. Trump holds a 69% approval rating among Republicans in the Times/Siena poll. While it’s not on par with former Republican presidents, who usually score in the 80s or 90s percentage-wise, according to Rudalevige, it’s still likely a positive factor that may be emphasized to Trump,
given who he’s surrounded by. “He doesn’t speak to the crowds where there’s going to be pushback, or even meet with [those] people,” Rudalevige said. “The president travels with a bubble that’s much more impermeable.” Even with that 69% approval rating, there have been reports that Trump’s support base has started to erode, especially because of the Iran war. But his MAGA support system still enables him to disregard the need to actually address the issues that have caused his approval rating to decline, Christenson
argues. “This durable core of party support allows him to largely dismiss his broader, national polling drops, finding political insulation in the consistency of his remaining base,” Christenson said. And so far, there’s little reason to think this time will be any different.
Trump approval rating, New York Times Siena poll, 37%, Iran war, cost of living, economy, Truth Social, Dino Christenson, Doug Kriner, political science