Could This Finally Be The Nail In The Coffin For Trump?

President Donald Trump has survived political scandals, crises and low approval ratings the likes of which no previous president could withstand. So it may be hard to believe that ol’ Donny Trump won’t, yet again, wriggle his way out of another disastrous drop in his political standing.

But this time it really may be different.

Trump’s Iran war has, even more than anything before, sent his approval rating in a nosedive. Poll aggregators now put him below 40% approval for the first time in his second term as multiple polls have shown his approval in the low- to mid-30s. His net approval is at -21.4, according to the poll aggregator FiftyPlusOne.

“When compared to past presidents, Trump’s ratings are the lowest of any president at this point in their term, going back to FDR,” pollster G. Elliott Morris wrote at his Strength In Numbers site on Friday.

His shambolic address to the nation on Wednesday demonstrated that he can’t TACO his way out of this one: Amid unconvincing boasts that the U.S. is “winning bigger than ever before,” Trump offered no clear rationale for the war and no plan or strategy to end it or resolve the vast economic disruption created by Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz. It didn’t work. The stock market dropped and the price of oil spiked as soon as he finished speaking.

The speech showed that Trump is stuck. He is constitutionally incapable of accepting that he made a mistake by attacking Iran with no plan for keeping 20% of the world’s oil — not to mention around 20% of the world’s fertilizer — moving through the strait, or to take action to rectify it. Instead, he now claims that it’s “somebody else’s problem” and, in his speech to the nation, called on European and Asian countries to “grab it and cherish it.”

Since this isn’t going to happen, the only other options are likely desperate. Trump could escalate and invade Iran with ground troops, which will make the energy crisis catastrophically worse. Or he could unilaterally deescalate, end the war and cede control of the strait to Iran, which would likely mean Iran operating a tolling system to exit the Persian Gulf, as it has already begun to do, and a continued reduction in oil flowing through.

“No matter how we exit this, we’re in a much worse scenario for the oil market than we were before,” oil analyst Rory Johnston said on his podcast “Oil Ground Up” on March 31.

This is politically toxic for any administration. But it is even worse for Trump personally, as his second term has been plagued by one unpopular initiative after another.

Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs, since ruled unconstitutional, caused instant market chaos. His mass deportation campaign of attacking U.S. cities with paramilitary forces turned his most popular position into a net negative. His bungling of the Epstein Files turned his own brand of conspiracism against him. His Big Beautiful Bill slashed health care spending, causing millions who get insurance through the Affordable Care Act to lose it due to huge price spikes.

That last point is key to his biggest problem: most of his major actions have caused price increases, in complete contradiction to his core campaign promise to lower domestic costs. His on-again, off-again tariffs led to widespread price increases on a range of goods while his immigration crackdown has led to increased costs in fields like in-home elder care and agriculture. Meanwhile, the full impact of the Iran war on prices, particularly for gas, has not yet come close to being felt.

Trump and his economic advisers are already trying to claim that these price effects are merely temporary. During his Wednesday speech, Trump said that when the war ends, “gas prices will rapidly come back down.” National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said on Friday that “energy prices are going down as this quiets down,” pointing to lower oil futures prices for fall shipments.

But this is just the same happy-talk that Trump offered during the early stages of COVID about cases “going down” and promises that the virus would just “disappear.” If anything, oil prices are currently being traded based on “irrational optimism,” Johnston said on his podcast, adding that “futures markets are grievously underpricing.”

This is exactly the opposite of what voters who swung to Trump in 2024 wanted. The top issue in that election, particularly for swing voters, was the cost of living and inflation. That single issue helped Trump build a coalition that gave him a popular vote majority for the first time in three elections. But that victory made him think he had a mandate to do whatever he wanted, and he promptly went about ignoring voters’ main concern.

The response from voters is about what you’d expect. Working-class Black and Latino voters who swung to him in 2024 are now moving away from Trump and Republicans, according to a March 2026 study by the Center for Working-Class Politics. This flip showed up in recent elections like the 2025 New Jersey and Virginia governors’ races, where the Democratic candidates won big in heavily Latino areas that had swung to Trump just one year earlier.

Young people aged 18-34 moved towards Trump in 2024 and gave him positive approval numbers at the beginning of his term, but a recent CNN poll found 80% now disapprove. Similarly, 73% of independent voters now disapprove of Trump, according to that same CNN poll.

It is not surprising that Trump is growing more and more unpopular as he has somehow brought about all of the worst problems that vexed past presidents all by himself. He has created, on his own, Joe Biden’s inflation, Jimmy Carter’s energy shock (caused by a conflict in Iran, no less) and George W. Bush’s catastrophic war of choice in the Middle East. With the downing of an American jet over Iran, he may also replicate the disaster Carter faced with an Iranian hostage crisis. And he has done it all by launching his own war of choice, after campaigning on a promise of no new wars. It is hard to imagine a worse series of political decisions.

With the midterm elections a scant seven months away, things look bleak for Republicans in November. Even if they lose only the House, that will effectively end congressional blessing for Trump’s authoritarian power grab — and, in all likelihood, condemn his final two years in office to investigation, impeachment and repudiation.