Five months into his second term as president, Americans are deeply unsatisfied with how Trump has handled the economy, immigration and tariffs. No wonder his approval rating is underwater.
Anyone who saw Donald Trump rally his supporters for reelection heard him make sweeping promises on three key pillars of his campaign ‒ improving the economy, deporting undocumented immigrants and penalizing other countries with tariffs.
Five months into his second term as president, Americans are deeply unsatisfied with how Trump has handled those three issues, according to a new Quinnipiac University Poll released Thursday, June 26.
Immigrants have been Trump’s favorite boogeymen for a solid decade, ever since he declared his first run for president in 2015. And he found supporters by demonizing undocumented immigrants, winning elections in 2016 and 2024.
But now that Trump holds the power to deport those immigrants, as he repeatedly promised, Americans appear to be repulsed by what that looks like.
Turn on any television news broadcast or open any social media platform. You’ll see heavily armed men in masks, wearing body armor, refusing to show identification as they grab men, women and children ‒ sometimes with wanton and unnecessary violence ‒ on streets, in warehouses and meatpacking plants, and on farm fields across the country.
Unfortunately for Trump, Americans have some empathy
A Dec. 18 Quinnipiac Poll, released a month before Trump took office, found that 55% of registered voters preferred giving undocumented immigrants a pathway to legal status here in America, while 36% wanted to deport most of them.
Six months later, Quinnipiac finds a 9-point swing on the issue, with 64% now saying they want a pathway to citizenship and 31% still preferring deportation. It leaps off the page: a significant shift in public opinion that has to be attributed to Americans seeing Trump getting what he has always wanted when it comes to immigrants.
The poll also found that 56% disapprove of how Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is doing its job, while 39% approve.
ICE raids in California provoked protests that Trump tried to politicize by sending in the military. American voters don’t like that either, disapproving of deploying the Army National Guard by 55-43% and disapproving by 60-37% his decision to also deploy U.S. Marines.
Tim Malloy, a Quinnipiac University polling analyst, told me that “there’s a lot of empathy for people who want to stay here,” reflected in the poll, and that American compassion rings out even during a time of international turmoil and conflict.
“Keep in mind,” Malloy added, “this all happened in the midst of Gaza, Russia, and Iran, and yet those videos coming out of California of ICE raids in fields and Marines in LA top the news.”
It turns out Americans also like democracy
Something else jumps out from the poll ‒ Americans are worried about America.
The economy was the top concern cited by voters in Quinnipiac Polls in late January (24%) and in mid-March (30%). But “preserving democracy” was the top concern in the June poll ‒ at 24% ‒ while the economic concern fell to 19%.
Malloy told me that’s the first time he’s seen “the economy eclipsed by concern about the very bedrock of the country.”
No wonder Trump’s approval rating is underwater, with 54% disapproving of the way he is handling the presidency and just 41% approving.
The June Quinnipiac poll also shows that on immigration, 57% disapprove and 41% approve. On the economy, 56% disapprove and 39% approve. And on trade, after Trump’s fruitless tariff wars with international allies, 55% approve and 38% disapprove.
Trump’s signature policy proposal ‒ the so-called Big Beautiful Bill being batted about by Republicans in Congress to continue tax breaks for America’s wealthiest people while stripping health care from some of the poorest ‒ is also deeply unpopular, with 55% opposing it and 29% supporting it.
That tracks with recent polling, which shows the more people learn about the budget bill, the more they hate it.
Trump will spin his lies on poor polling, but the numbers won’t
Expect pushback from Trump and his supporters, who won’t like what Quinnipiac found in this latest survey. That’s to be expected. Trump always touts polls that tell him what he wants to hear and flouts polls that give him bad news.
So keep this in mind: On at least three occasions from late March to early June in 2024, Trump’s campaign emailed journalists news releases pointing to Quinnipiac polling that showed him performing well in the race for president. Trump, using his Truth Social platform while running for office, repeatedly bragged about Quinnipiac polls that pleased him and attacked Quinnipiac if he didn’t like a poll’s results.
A shorter version of that point ‒ you can’t trust anything Trump says about polling.
But, as Malloy noted, Trump has been in worse spots when it comes to the approval of Americans. His disapproval rating hit 60% in a Quinnipiac poll released Jan. 11, 2021, just five days after he incited supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol because he could not accept that he had lost the 2020 election.
I counted 41 times in Quinnipiac polls done monthly during Trump’s first term, from January 2017 to January 2021, when his approval rating was lower than in this new poll. Trump could take that as good news. I doubt he will.
But here’s another chunk of good news in the June poll ‒ Americans are clearly concerned about the state of America, but they don’t think our democracy will end during their lifetime: 49% said our democracy is not working, compared with 43% who say it is. But 73% think democracy will outlast this, while just 17% say it won’t.
“There are major domestic and international crises the country is facing,” Malloy said. “And, at the same time that we’re politically divided, there’s a belief that democracy will survive. And that’s heartening.”
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