A new poll revealed a major shift in President Donald Trump‘s approval rating more than six months into his second term.
Trump secured a 45% approval rating in the latest survey from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research. The poll results, released Wednesday, showed Trump’s highest approval rating ever from AP-NORC Center since the start of his first term.
The approval rating is also up 5 percentage points since the poll was last conducted in July.
The poll comes as Trump escalates the federal crackdown on Washington, D.C., claiming that there were high crime rates in the nation’s capital. His efforts may have paid off, with 53% approving of how he is handling crime.
This is higher than his approval rating on other issues, including the economy (43%), immigration (44%) and the Russia-Ukraine war (42%).
The poll also found that Trump has more than half of the public support when it comes to deploying the military and the National Guard to U.S. cities, with 55% of Americans thinking it’s acceptable.
The poll was conducted Aug. 21-25 among 1,182 respondents. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.8 percentage points.
Other recent polls have shown an uptick in Trump’s approval rating. A Gallup poll, released Tuesday, showed Trump’s approval rating 3 percentage points higher than it was last month.
The Gallup poll found that 40% of Americans approved of Trump’s overall job performance in August—up three percentage points since the poll was last taken in July. Gallup noted that the latest results are “in line” with the 40% of support he received in June after the president had a 43% or higher approval rating in the first five months of the year.
Trump mocked after defying basic math: ‘Utterly innumerate’.
President Donald Trump left social media users baffled after he claimed on Sunday that he had lowered prescription drug prices by up to 1,500%.
Trump administration plans four-year limit on foreign students studying in the US
While in Allentown, Pennsylvania, Trump told reporters that Republicans will turn their attention to the “tremendous drop in drug prices” ahead of the 2026 midterms.
“You know, we’ve cut drug prices by 1,200, 1,300, 1,400, 1,500%,” Trump said, before boarding Air Force One to return to Washington, D.C.
“I don’t mean 50% — I mean 14, 1,500%,” he added.
Trump went on to say that he wants the United States to offer the same prices as Europe and what “other country gets.”
“So we’ll be dropping drug prices. It’ll start over the next two to three months, by 1,200, 1,300 and even 1,400%, and 500%, but not just 50% or 25%, which normally would be a lot, because the rest of the world pays much less for the identical drug,” Trump said.
Reducing the price of a product by 100% would make it free — meaning Trump’s figures, all above 500%, would point to the consumer receiving money back when purchasing an item. His claims quickly drew reactions on social media, with many users taking notice of the impossible figures.
Gregg Nunziata, a conservative lawyer, said that it is “great” to have a “numerically illiterate person unilaterally in charge of our tariff policy.”
“‘On June 15, 1992, [Dan] Quayle altered 12-year-old student William Figueroa’s correct spelling of ‘potato’ to ‘potatoe’ at the Muñoz Rivera Elementary School spelling bee in Trenton, New Jersey. He was the subject of widespread ridicule for his error.’” — @Wikipedia,” Justin Wolfers, a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan, joked.
George Conway, an attorney once involved in Republican politics turned prominent Trump critic, called Trump an “utter moron” over his claims.
“This would mean, in essence, that consumers would be getting paid by manufacturers or retailers to receive medications—in fact, getting paid up to 11, 12, 13, or 14 times what the consumers were previously paying to the sellers for prescriptions,” Conway wrote.
In a separate post, Conway said that Trump has “shown himself to be utterly innumerate.”
A journalist noted how Trump has yet to cut drug prices — but has instead sent letters to top pharmaceutical manufacturers outlining steps of how they can bring down prices to match the lowest price offered in other nations.
“Does he know that and is lying? Or is he deluded? We have no idea,” the user wrote.
Another user chimed in: “The prescription costs $100. You go to the drug store to pick it up, and instead of paying the pharmacist, the pharmacist gives you the medicine AND $1,400! Why didn’t any previous president think of this!?”
Trump’s comments came on the heels of his firing of Erika McEntarfer, the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, over revised weak job numbers that he made clear he did not support. The independent body had released a report hours earlier showing that hiring had slowed down significantly over the last three months.
On his Truth Social platform, Trump said the “Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad.”
“Those big adjustments were made to cover up, and level out, the FAKE political numbers that were CONCOCTED in order to make a great Republican Success look less stellar!!! I will pick an exceptional replacement,” Trump wrote in a new post on Monday.
Trump administration plans four-year limit on foreign students studying in the US
Trump admin offers subdued response to Russia’s assault on Kyiv, and Europe’s outrage
Allies sought to convince Trump that deadly overnight attacks make clear that Putin’s not interested in peace. But they made little headway.
President Donald Trump was not particularly perturbed by Vladimir Putin’s overnight bombardment of Kyiv — the largest Russian assault since the leaders met two weeks earlier. European leaders spent the morning trying to get him there.
In a flurry of social media posts designed for an audience of one, they pointed to Russia’s barrage of several hundred missiles and drones as proof that Putin is not sincere in his overtures for peace.
But on Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt insinuated that the attack on Ukraine’s capital that killed at least 19 people, including four children, was an understandable response to Ukraine’s assault on Russian refineries over the last month.
Trump “was not happy about this move, but he was also not surprised,” Leavitt said, reiterating that the president wants the bloodshed to stop but blamed both countries for the lack of progress in negotiations. “These are two countries that have been at war for a very long time. Russia launched this attack on Kyiv, and likewise, Ukraine recently dealt a blow to Russia’s oil refineries.”
The administration’s neutral response to the Russian attack comes despite the public pleas from European allies who insisted that Russia’s onslaught is more than tit-for-tat.
“Russia has no intentions of ending this war,” wrote Finland’s president, Alex Stubb, in a post on X.
French President Emmanuel Macron, who like Stubb was one of seven European leaders who met with Trump last week at the White House alongside Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, also lamented the attack featuring more than 600 missiles and drones in a single night: “this is Russia’s idea of peace,” he wrote. “Terror and barbarism.”
Stubb, Macron, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and others condemning Russian attacks and publicly questioning Putin’s intentions are “trying to use last night’s attack on Ukraine to appeal to Trump’s reluctance to see casualties,” said one senior European official, who like several others interviewed for this story was granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “They hope to make him more resolute.”
While constructive talks among U.S. and European officials about how to guarantee Ukraine’s postwar security when the war ends are ongoing, there is a clear disconnect about the prospects for peace in the near term. The Trump administration has vacillated between insisting Putin is ready to negotiate in good faith and resignation that the war will continue for some time.
“Perhaps both sides of this war are not ready to end it,” Leavitt said. “The president wants its end, but the leaders of these two countries need it to end.”
Trump did impose additional tariffs on India this week, raising the rate to 50 percent as punishment for purchasing Russian oil, but the White House has refused to impose additional economic sanctions on Russia.
Ukraine has made Western-backed security guarantees a central demand in any settlement to prevent further Russian attacks. After Zelenskyy and some of his key European backers gathered at the White House earlier this month, Trump’s administration signaled it would support a European-led force helping guarantee Ukrainian security, providing intelligence assets and battlefield oversight and taking part in an air defense shield.
But while Trump said afterward that he would like a trilateral meeting with Putin and Zelenskyy, and that the Russian had agreed to the idea, Moscow has backtracked on a peace summit and ruled out several proposals to fortify Ukraine’s future security.
That’s left Kremlin-watchers and European leaders increasingly doubtful that Putin is serious about making peace.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, addressing the press before a meeting with Macron in southern France, dismissed Trump’s assertion that a Putin-Zelenskyy summit had been agreed to and would happen soon.
“It is obviously not going to come to a meeting between President Zelenskyy and President Putin — unlike what had been agreed between President Trump and President Putin last week, when we were together in Washington.”
Starmer, who’s developed a strong rapport with Trump, was blunt in blaming Putin, who he wrote was “killing children and civilians, and sabotaging hopes of peace.”
A second European official confirmed that the morning messages were an effort to influence Trump’s thinking, although the person was not optimistic that the attacks would lead Trump to ratchet up the economic pressure on Putin.
“He’s been upset about [Putin’s] bombings for months, but there’s yet to be any actual response beyond words,” the second official said.
Brett Bruen, the president of a Washington-based foreign affairs think tank and a former diplomat during former President Barack Obama’s term, went far beyond the implicit critiques of European leaders determined to keep Trump in the fold.
“Putin punked Trump,” Bruen said, noting that Putin left the Alaska summit having made no concrete concessions. “As we saw with Kim Jong Un, Trump often puts the summit before the substance or even some semblance of a strategy. But, these large recent strikes on Kyiv are the Kremlin really trying to drive home the point that Moscow’s most meddlesome man is the one wearing the pants in this relationship.”
After months of mounting frustration with Putin for escalating the war and ignoring his pleas to negotiate, Trump seemed to wipe the slate clean with the Russian leader during their summit in Alaska. Welcoming Putin’s plane with a red carpet on the tarmac, Trump left their three-hour meeting with little beyond his own declaration that he’d received an assurance Russia would accept some security guarantees for Ukraine, just not future membership in NATO.
But since the meeting, the Kremlin has shot down the possibility of sending European peacekeeping forces in Ukraine and suggested that talks about security guarantees that didn’t give Russia a say were a “road to nowhere.”
Nevertheless, Trump since meeting Putin has reverted to a rhetorical both-sidesism, telling reporters earlier this week that “it takes two to tango” as he essentially shrugged about whether there would be a Putin-Zelenskyy summit, something he announced just 11 days earlier that both leaders had agreed to.
“I don’t know that they’ll meet — maybe they will, maybe they won’t,” Trump said on Monday.
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