President Donald Trump's approval rating is reaching new lows as Americans grow frustrated with the high cost of living and Trump's choice to mire the country in a new foreign war.

In fact, since Trump launched the boondoggle of a war in Iran, his average net approval rating has fallen roughly five percentage points, according to polling analyst Nate Silver. His approval rating now stands at an abysmally low 39.9 percent.

In fact, the latest Economist/YouGov poll, released Tuesday, finds Trump at just 35 percent approval—the lowest the organization has recorded in Trump's second term. It’s also near his all-time low in the poll, 34 percent, which he recorded in November 2017.

CNN Chief Data Analyst Harry Enten put it like this:

A steady fall into the abyss for Trump's net approval, as it falls into Death Valley. He's now at a term 2 low: -18 pts. Big reason why: Independents. Trump's at -45 pts. The worst for any prez at this point in term 2. Worse than Nixon (-36 pts) at the height of Watergate!

Indeed, the Economist/YouGov poll found Trump's support falling in almost every group. That includes self-identified Republican voters, whose approval has declined by 3 points since last week.

Trump's support from people who voted for him in 2024 also saw a precipitous drop since he launched the Iran war in late February.

In a poll conducted just as he started the Iran "excursion"—as he so eloquently described it—84 percent of Trump 2024 voters approved of the job he was doing as president. Now only 76 percent approve, marking a steep eight-point drop in about one month.

In fact, the only group where Trump's support has held steady is among self-proclaimed MAGA supporters, 92 percent of whom still approve of their Dear Leader. That's virtually unchanged from the 94 percent of MAGA supporters who approved of him as the war began.

That means we are quickly approaching a point where Trump's MAGA base may be the only ones who approve of the job he is doing in office. And that news should horrify Republicans, who were already battling extreme headwinds in the November midterms.

If Trump 2024 voters stay home or vote for Democrats, the electoral consequences for Republicans will be ugly.

And while there's a long way to go until November, Silver's analysis shows that even when Trump's approval rating likely improves after the self-inflicted messes die down, they may never fully recover. After all, Trump's approval rating shows a downward trajectory since Inauguration Day 2025.

Of course, an improvement in Trump’s approval assumes that the war in Iran and the fallout from it won't get worse.

Trump is clearly looking for an off-ramp, though his erratic missives about his plans are impossible to follow.

But even if the war ended today and Iran reopened the critical Strait of Hormuz oil passageway—which it has been blocking for more than four weeks—experts said fuel prices will take months to go back to pre-war levels. That's because it takes time for the commodity to be shipped across the world, as well as for refineries to restart their production and repair the damage they sustained from Iranian missile strikes.

Already, gas prices are now averaging more than $4 per gallon across the country—a high not seen since 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine. And we all know how that worked out for Joe Biden and the Democratic Party.

And rising fuel prices have negative downstream effects on the economy. Companies and farmers have to contend with higher costs to ship and harvest their crops—costs they then pass down to consumers. Worse is that oil and natural gas are used in many other products, such as plastics, rubber, synthetic fabrics, and more. Thus rising oil prices make it more expensive to produce countless other necessary household items.

Given that inflation and the cost of living are the most important issues to Americans, that should have Republicans shaking in their boots.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos