Political inflection point? Trump’s approval rating is cratering

This is an adapted excerpt from the April 22 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”

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Every single day, President Donald Trump digs this country deeper and deeper into his mess. On Wednesday evening, we learned that the secretary of the Navy, a guy named John Phelan, had been fired by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in the midst of a war that has not ended.

The United States has directed an enormous number of its naval assets to Iran. According to the Pentagon, we are conducting an active naval blockade there.

Phelan’s firing comes just three weeks after the Army chief of staff was also fired.

But it also comes at the tail end of a truly awful 24 hours for the White House. Even grading on a curve, for what has been, generally speaking, a pretty rough year for this president, Trump had an absolutely brutal day on Tuesday. It was one of those days that, in hindsight, can look like a political inflection point.

According to a horrendous series of polls, the number of people who support this president is getting smaller by the day. The most favorable of the surveys for the president was from The Economist/YouGov, which showed Trump with a 38% approval rating. That was as good as it got.

As we often say on “All In,” when the favorability numbers begin regularly starting with a 3, that is when the wheels start coming off the whole political project.

An NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll had the second-best numbers for Trump, with his approval hovering at 37%. In that same poll, though, half of all respondents said they “strongly disapproved” of the job he is doing.

Reuters/Ipsos had its own poll, showing Trump at 36% approval. That puts it somewhere in the middle of the results we got.

Polls from Angus Reid Global and Strength in Numbers/Verasight both showed something similar, with Trump at 35% approval.

An Associated Press-NORC survey found Trump’s approval even lower, at 33%, meaning just one-third of voters are on board with the president’s agenda.

Rounding out the bottom is a poll from the American Research Group, or ARG, with Trump at just 32% approval.

Now, this last number appears to be an outlier. But there is clearly a trend here: All the numbers are in the 30s.

It is a losing streak rivaled only by the New York Mets. (Sorry, Mets fans, I love you.) But you get the point: People are unhappy.

Just for comparison, at the lowest point of Trump’s popularity during his first term — in the immediate aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol — his approval rating was 34%.

Which means, according to some polls, he is already less popular than when he led a violent insurrectionist mob to try to overturn the results of the election he lost. And even if you trust the rosiest assessments of his presidency, it appears he is rapidly approaching that point.

Trump’s situation is starting to echo the lame-duck period of George W. Bush’s second term. After he launched two disastrous wars, the previous Republican president’s approval rating started to dip into the mid-to-high 20s.

I’m not sure if something like that is even possible in this current polarized environment. But if things continue on this same track, who knows?

There are already signs that voters are fed up. According to that Verasight poll I mentioned, 55% of the country — a clear majority — supports impeaching Trump.