How popular is Donald Trump?
Silver Bulletin approval ratings for President Trump — and all presidents since Truman.
🕒 The latest on Trump’s approval rating
Updated October 17, 2025
We’re 270 days into Donald Trump’s second term and 15 days into the shutdown of the federal government. And as of today, 44.2 percent of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing and 52.1 percent disapprove. That -7.8 net approval rating (using unrounded results when available) is a slight improvement from where Trump was last week (-9.3) but pretty much par for the course compared to the past few months. Trump’s net approval ratings on inflation (-27.2), the economy (-14.4), and trade (-13.8) are also firmly underwater. And even his immigration approval rating has fallen from +11.0 at the start of his term to -3.2 today.
But Trump is still more popular than he was at this point in his first term. Here’s how Trump’s current net approval rating compares to day 270 of the past three administrations:
Joe Biden: -5.8 (-2)
Trump 1.0: -16.1 (+8.3)
Barack Obama: +10.4 (-18.2)
One takeaway here is that while Trump absolutely is unpopular, his overall approval rating isn’t unusually low. At this point, he’s not doing much worse than Biden was in 2021. But on the other hand, approval of how Trump is handling issues like the economy is meaningfully lower than it was during his first term. We don’t have an economic approval average for Biden, but according to Reuters/Ipsos, Trump is already down to where Biden was in 2024. -EMD, 10/16/25
See also: Elon Musk favorability rating dashboard.
This is the landing page for Silver Bulletin presidential approval ratings. It will always contain the latest data from our average of presidential approval polls and we’ll regularly update these approval ratings as new polls come in.1
Our polling average is the direct descendant of the presidential approval average that Nate designed for FiveThirtyEight. Click here for more information on how the average works. The Silver Bulletin average weights more reliable polls more heavily — you can find our latest pollster ratings here. It adjusts for house effects. And it accounts for uncertainty, estimating the range where new polls might come in.
The topline: So, just how popular is Trump?
Our default average reflects a combination of all polls, whether conducted among adults, registered voters or likely voters. If a pollster releases multiple versions of the same survey, we use the all-adult version of the poll before the registered voter version.2 This is because all Americans have a say in how popular the president is — whether or not they vote.
The polls: What do the surveys say?
Inevitably, there’s a lot of disagreement from survey to survey, not just because of statistical variation but because pollsters have long had trouble pegging down Trump’s popularity — and often underestimated it. So you can see all the numbers here and how house effects work in the model. You can also click here to download every Trump approval poll in our database — including some additional details not shown in the chart below.
Each poll gets an “influence” score based on its pollster rating, its sample size, its recency, and how often a pollster is publishing numbers.3 Sometimes, surveys with mediocre pollster ratings have more weight in the model just because they were conducted very recently or polled more people.
The issues: What do Americans think of Trump’s policies?
Pollsters don’t just ask about Trump’s overall job approval, they also ask about how well he’s dealing with different issues. We’re tracking how the public feels about Donald Trump’s handling of some of the most salient topics: the economy, immigration, trade and tariffs, and the cost of living.
The deep dive
We also have a few features we’re reserving for paying subscribers:
How do Trump’s approval ratings compare to every past president since Truman?
How many voters strongly approve or disapprove of Trump?
What are Trump’s numbers in only polls of adults or only polls of likely and registered voters?
You can find all of that, plus downloadable data on every president’s approval rating every day since 1945, down below.