Reaction & Commentary
President Donald Trump vows to “TELL IT LIKE IT IS” during his primetime address Tuesday to a joint session of Congress.
“TOMORROW NIGHT WILL BE BIG,” the president touted in a social media post on the eve of his first major speech to Congress during his second presidential administration.
Trump is expected to use the address — which Fox News was first to report will be themed, “The Renewal of the American Dream” — to showcase his avalanche of activity during his first six weeks in the White House.
“Best Opening Month of any President in history,” Trump wrote in a social media post last week, as he touted his accomplishments — some of them controversial — since his Jan. 20 inauguration.
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President Donald Trump makes an economic announcement in the Roosevelt Room at the White House in Washington, D.C., on March 3, 2025. (REUTERS/Leah Millis)
However, the latest polls indicate Americans are divided on the job he has done so far.
Trump stands at 45% approval and 49% disapproval in one of those polls, according to a Marist College poll for PBS News and NPR. Additionally, a CNN survey, also conducted last week, put the president’s approval rating at 48%, with 52% disapproving.
But Trump’s approval ratings were above water in other new polls, including one for CBS News that was also in the field in recent days and released over the weekend.
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With the president being a polarizing and larger-than-life politician, it is no surprise that the latest polls indicate a massive partisan divide over Trump’s performance. The surveys spotlight that the vast majority of Democrats give the president a big thumbs down, while Republicans overwhelmingly approve of the job he is doing in office.
While Americans are split on Trump’s performance, the approval ratings for his second term are an improvement from his first tour of duty, when he started 2017 in negative territory and remained underwater throughout his four-year tenure in the White House.
President Donald Trump talks with reporters before boarding Marine One on the South Lawn of the White House, on Friday, Feb. 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)
One reason — Trump nowadays enjoys rock solid Republican support.
“He never had support among Democrats in the first administration, but he also had some trouble with Republicans,” Daron Shaw, a politics professor and chair at the University of Texas, noted.
Shaw, who serves as a member of the Fox News Decision Team and the Republican partner on the Fox News Poll, emphasized “that’s one acute difference between 2017 and 2025. The party’s completely solidified behind him.”
Trump has been moving at warp speed during his opening six weeks back in the White House with a flurry of executive orders and actions. His moves not only fulfilled some of his major campaign trail promises, but also allowed the returning president to flex his executive muscles, quickly put his stamp on the federal government, make major cuts to the federal workforce and also settle some long-standing grievances.
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Trump as of Tuesday had signed 82 executive orders since his inauguration, according to a count from Fox News, which far surpasses the rate of any recent presidential predecessors during their first weeks in office.
President Donald Trump signs an executive order in the Oval Office at the White House on Feb. 14, 2025. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Those moves include a high-profile crackdown on immigration, slapping steep tariffs on major trading partners, including Canada and Mexico, and freezing foreign aid to Ukraine.
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“It’s been a flooding-of-the-zone here every day, often multiple times a day,” Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, told Fox News Digital. “We’re just seeing a lot of things happening with little time for the public to digest. The net effect of it all is there’s a sense, on the part of the public, that some things are moving just a little too fast.”
While an improvement over his first term, Trump’s approval ratings are lower six weeks into his presidency than any of his recent predecessors in the White House.
Shaw noted that neither Trump nor former President Joe Biden “started out with overwhelming approval. This is not like the honeymoon period that we historically expect presidents to enjoy….Historically, the other side gives you a little bit of leeway when you first come in. That just doesn’t happen anymore.”
Biden’s approval rating hovered in the low- to mid-50s during the first six months of his single term as president, with his disapproval in the upper 30s to the low- to mid-40s.
However, Biden’s numbers sank into negative territory in the late summer and autumn of 2021, in the wake of his much-criticized handling of the turbulent U.S. exit from Afghanistan, and amid soaring inflation and a surge of migrants crossing into the U.S. along the nation’s southern border with Mexico.
President Joe Biden speaks about his administration on Dec. 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh)
Biden’s approval ratings stayed underwater throughout the rest of his presidency.
“He just got crippled and never recovered,” Shaw said of Biden.
An average of all the most recent national polls indicates that Trump’s approval ratings are just above water. However, Trump has seen his numbers edge down slightly since returning to the White House in late January, when an average of his polls indicated the president’s approval rating in the low 50s and his disapproval in the mid 40s.
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“The honeymoon is over, and he’s actually governing, and that typically does bring numbers down,” veteran political scientist Wayne Lesperance, the president of New Hampshire-based New England College, told Fox News Digital. “I expect the numbers to continue to slip as the changes in Washington really do begin to impact people’s everyday lives.”
Shaw noted that Trump’s “rating on the economy is about minus four, which is 25 points better than Biden. He’s above water on immigration. His best issue right now is crime. He’s plus ten on crime.”
However, Shaw emphasized that inflation, the issue that helped propel Trump back into the White House, remains critical to the president’s political fortunes.
“If prices remain high, he’s going to have trouble,” Shaw warned.
