Trump is losing the public over Iran
Approval how how he's handling foreign policy, prices, and the presidency in general has fallen in the wake of the conflict
Donald Trump won the 2024 election in large part on two promises to the American people. First, he wouldn’t get involved in any more foreign wars; candidate Trump charged Democrats with dragging the country into endless quagmires in Ukraine and the Middle East that used up resources that could be spent here at home. And second, he would bring down prices for everyday goods and services such as groceries, electricity, and gasoline.
But despite his promise to lower prices “on Day One,” inflation hasn’t fallen during his first year in office. And in starting a war with Iran on Feb. 28, 2026, President Trump broke the first promise — and he set off a chain of events that would further exacerbate prices, breaking the second. Since the start of the war, the national average price of a gallon of gasoline in America has risen 42%, from $2.90 to $4.13.
Accordingly, Americans’ approval of how Trump is handling prices has fallen to an all-time low. The 50+1 average of issue polls, which indexes every national survey that asks Americans how they think the president is handling certain policies, shows Trump’s rating on prices/inflation falling from -26 at the start of the war (already his worst policy issue overall) to -33 today.
But the bigger drop has come on handling America’s relationship with Iran. After strikes last summer that the administration claimed destroyed Iran’s capability to build a nuclear weapon, Trump’s net approval rating on the issue was -7. That made conflict with Iran one of the president’s strongest issues — better than his approval rating overall, on foreign policy, and even on immigration, his rosiest issue today. And the short-lived military intervention in Venezuela was also viewed more positively than his overall approval and his foreign policy approval. But as the current war has unfolded, voters have turned against him quickly. On March 1, adults were against Trump’s handling of Iran by 13 points. Today, his rating has fallen to -27.
Americans’ net rating of how President Trump is handling foreign policy in general has also sunk since March 1, from -16 to -19.
The war in Iran presents a two-pronged issue for the president. Not only is it a highly visible example of him breaking a key election promise, but rising gas prices also feed directly into voters’ anxieties about the cost-of-living crisis that already constituted Trump’s weakest issue. Voters are experiencing two broken promises at once.
The cost of these broken promises are also visible in Trump’s overall approval rating, which has fallen from -19 to -21 since the start of the conflict. And that’s bad for the president, because it’s much easier to lose a supporter than persuade an opponent. As I wrote last week, Trump’s approval trend basically never improves — once he loses support, he doesn’t win it back.
The political question now is whether either issue resolves in favor of the president. If gas prices stay elevated and the war continues without a clear resolution — or even if it resolves, but the flow of oil remains interrupted — Republicans will face voters at the midterms who feel worse off on the two things Trump promised to fix. But immediate deescalation, for now, looks unlikely: On Tuesday, April 7, Trump threatened Iran by posting on his social media app that “a whole civilization will die tonight.” If the president continues to break his promises, his numbers will continue to slip.
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