After 100 days of chaos, the president’s numbers are in free fall, and that’s emboldening his critics everywhere—even in Alabama.
President Donald Trump walks toward the White House in Washington, DC, on April 27, 2025.(Annabelle Gordon / AFP via Getty Images)
After the first 100 days of his second term, Donald Trump occupies the national stage as a historically unpopular president—a suddenly exposed and challenged commander in chief whose combination of scorching ineptitude and creeping authoritarianism has removed the veil of invincibility that Trump obtained in the period leading up to and immediately following his inauguration on January 20.
Trump’s personal approval ratings are collapsing. So are the polling numbers that measure enthusiasm for his approach to issues that were once considered to be his strong suit. And so, too, are the numbers for his congressional allies, who now face the very real potential for defeats in the 2026 midterm elections that could leave Trump’s administration without the ability to govern in the last two years of his second term.
Media outlets tend to do some of their most precise polling at the 100-day mark for new administrations. Usually, the numbers point to subtle upticks or downturns. But there is nothing subtle about the overwhelming rejection of Trump and his policies. After two and a half months of absolute chaos, on everything from tariffs to civil liberties to the undermining of Medicaid, voters are sending a crystal-clear message: enough.
The CNN media critic and author Brian Stelter summed things up well with a simple review of polling news from the last Sunday before Day 100 on Tuesday. “Media outlets released four major new polls today, all pegged to the 100-day mark of Trump’s second term, all with similar findings,” observed Stelter.
The headlines:
Washington Post/ABC News: “Trump approval sinks as Americans criticize his major policies.”
CNN: “Trump’s approval at 100 days lower than any president in seven decades.”
NBC: “Americans vent disappointment with Trump ahead of his 100-day mark, especially on tariffs.”
CBS: “Trump’s first 100 days seen as bringing big changes, but still too much focus on tariffs.”
Trump’s actual poll numbers are worse than those headlines suggest. He’s not just doing badly. He’s doing epically badly. Just 39 percent of those surveyed for the latest ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll approve of how Trump is serving as president. The ABC analysis of that figure explained, “Donald Trump has the lowest 100-day job approval rating of any president in the past 80 years, with public pushback on many of his policies and extensive economic discontent, including broad fears of a recession.”
Even supposedly conservative pollsters are suggesting that Trump’s in trouble, with Rasmussen Reports finding that, by a 51–42 margin, Americans think the country is headed in the wrong direction under Trump. The overall pattern, as reflected in the Real Clear Politics survey of all recent polls, finds that voters believe, by a 51–39 margin, that the country is off course.
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An even more serious concern for Trump and his allies is the collapse in faith in the president’s ability to deal with what were considered to be his strongest issues. The new Associated Press/IPSOS poll finds that 53 percent of Americans now disapprove of the president’s handling of immigration policy, while just 46 percent approve. Independent voters, whose support is critical for Trump, disapprove of his handling of migrant and refugee concerns by a staggering 61–37 margin. And the trouble is not limited to that one issue. The new Fox News poll finds that just 38 percent approve of Trump’s approach to taxes and the overall economy, while an even smaller cohort—a mere 33 percent— backs his handling of inflation.
For congressional Republicans who have stuck with Trump, the poll numbers have taken a major turn for the worse. The Fox News survey finds that, were the mid-term elections held now, voters would back generic Democratic candidates over Republicans by a 49–42 margin. That sort of split, were it to be reflected in the November 2026 midterm election results, would obliterate Republican control of the House.
But the midterms are a long way off. So can Trump and the GOP just wait things out and hope for a turn in their direction before the fall of next year? Not necessarily.
A political mood shift is taking place nationwide—even in red states that were once seen as safe spaces for Trump. And it doesn’t take a poll to illustrate the speed and significance of the turn against the president.
Trump’s ability to intimidate and discourage those who disagree with him is crumbling, as mass demonstrations against his policies erupt across the country and critics are boldly speaking out in the bluntest of terms.
How bad is it for Trump? In this college commencement season, the increasingly unpopular president isn’t going anywhere near the high-profile Northeastern university campuses that his administration has targeted for funding cuts and anti-immigrant raids in recent months. But the White House calculated that the president could appear without too much trouble on the Tuscaloosa campus of the University of Alabama– a move that returns Trump to a state where he has frequently campaigned over the past decade, and where he won in 2024 with 65 percent of the vote.
This spring, however, they calculated wrong. As soon as Trump’s commencement address was announced, University of Alabama College Democrats announced plans for a “Tide Against Trump” demonstration (which will feature former Texas US representative Beto O’Rourke) and declared that they were “shocked and disgusted to learn that our unpopular, divisive, and authoritarian president will be involved in commencement for the graduating class of 2025.” The group dismissed Trump as a “disgraced criminal,” decried the notion that the campus should serve as “a backdrop for MAGA propaganda,” and declared, “UA is not a fascist playground.”
Of course, Democrats can be expected to oppose Trump. But when Alabamians, no matter their partisan leanings, are ripping into Trump’s authoritarianism with explicit talk of fascism, that can’t be good for the president.
Within hours of the announcement of the president’s commencement plans, a “Tide Against Tyranny” petition demanding that Trump’s Thursday address in Tuscaloosa be canceled had drawn 25,000 signatures. The outcry in Alabama grew so loud that campus officials threatened students with “expulsion, arrest, and/or an immediate campus ban” if they object to Trump’s presence on the campus—where federal agents recently arrested and detained, he detainment of Alireza Doroudi, a PhD student from Iran who was studying at the university. The response from student activists was to mock the university for “coddling” Trump, whom students dismissed as a “whiny, childish autocrat.”
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And if that’s what they’re calling Trump in Alabama, you can just imagine what’s being said about the president in the rest of the country—a country where, as The Washington Post observed on Monday, “none of his policies tested in the poll enjoy majority support.” And pointed out that “Trump’s approval rating is lower than for any past president at the 100-day mark in their first or second terms.”
Lower than any president! In American history!
John NicholsTwitterJohn Nichols is the executive editor of The Nation. He previously served as the magazine’s national affairs correspondent and Washington correspondent. Nichols has written, cowritten, or edited over a dozen books on topics ranging from histories of American socialism and the Democratic Party to analyses of US and global media systems. His latest, cowritten with Senator Bernie Sanders, is the New York Times bestseller It's OK to Be Angry About Capitalism.