Bulwark Takes - Trump’s New Poll Numbers are AWFUL

Episode Date: June 12, 2025

Sam Stein and Sarah Longwell dive into a wave of troubling polling data for Donald Trump, including dismal approval numbers and declining support on key issues like immigration and the economy. We break down what the data reveals about voter sentiment and how Trump’s return to center stage is impacting his numbers.

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and tie it all together with a personalized domain name. Gear up for success with a brand that says you best. You can do it yourself on Wix. Hey everybody, it's me Sam Stein, managing editor at The Bullwork. Back again, I'm here with Sarah Longwell, our fearless publisher. Sarah, how's it going? It's going pretty good. This is me Sam Stein managing editor at the Bullwork back again. I'm here with Sarah Longwell, our fearless publisher.

Sarah, how's it going? It's going pretty good. I don't know. I haven't seen a tank yet, but the traffic in DC downtown is annoying. And so, you know, I do not like having everybody in my town's lives disrupted by this insane man's need for a birthday tank parade. I'm supposed to travel to DCA, to Reagan on Saturday morning. And I'm like kind of nervous that I'm going to get stopped by tanks. Yeah, I'm interested to see what the reaction is here,

whether or not like the protests that are being kind of pushed out, you know, because I think smartly they've organized the protests basically everywhere, but DC. Yeah. That said, when Trump came out and said, if there's any, any protests during my parade, they will be met with force. I was like, that sounds like an invitation to me. Yeah. He's basically come on down to cons.

I wasn't considering going, but suddenly I am. Uh, well, let's see what happens. Hopefully you don't get in trouble on Saturday just for my own well-being. We're here to talk about polls and there's been a slew of them. I will admit the first ones I was like this, I feel like this is an outlier, but I feel like at this point we have some compelling data sets that suggest that Trump is in actual trouble. This all started with Quinnipiac poll a couple days ago.

It showed that Trump's approval rating was at 3854 approved disapprove. And we were sort of like, wow, that's a real outlier that doesn't really jive with what we're hearing. But then today we have this APNORC poll that has him at 39 approve and was it 60 disapproved? No, can't be 50. It's got to be 50. I'll double check that. But either way, the approval is still down in the toilet at 39%. They've got him at disapproved 60% and approved 39. That's insane. Yeah. What is going on here? Is that, are you, are you, should we read into this at this point or now? I think you can read in a little. Here's, here's what I would do. And instead of just taking these two polls, let's think about how things have

been now for a while, which is you saw during the introduction of the tariffs, the concept of the tariffs, Trump's rollout of the tariffs, it was disorganized. He was walking them back. Everybody was talking about them. And this is a thing that I have seen happen over and over again with Trump. Everybody was talking about them. And this is a thing that I have seen happen over and over again with Trump. When he does a thing, when he puts it like takes one of his big, beautiful ideas and he shows it to the American people for real, everybody goes, wait, I'm sorry, what?

No. And so like then the tariffs were happening. His disapproval also jumped during that period. And then there was this middle period where everybody was like, you know, the tariff stuff kind of, there was a lot of talk, but then he pulled back, he talk-o'd. And as a result, you saw his numbers start to drift back up. And the other thing that was happening as Trump's numbers were drifting back up was that everyone was talking about Biden because of the Taber book.

There was suddenly almost a three weeks of news cycle in which the market was a little bit up and down, but no big deal. Trump had some of these crazy meetings, but it wasn't super Trump. We were all re-litigating Biden. Everybody was. Trump's numbers had started to drift back up because when people are focused on Trump, his number, his approval number goes down. When people are focused on something else and Trump's able to kind of recede to the background, his approval numbers go up. This is a, this is a truism about Trump. And so where are we right now?

Well, we see the protests coming front and center right now, right? We see, um, we see Trump in his parade. We've just, we've seen suddenly like Trump kind of drifts back into the center of the focus, the center of the chaos. And also his big, beautiful bill is at the middle of it. Right. And so what did we have, uh, probably about the time this was in the field was the blow up with Musk, Musk crapping on the bill. And so you can see how, when we're talking about Biden, Trump gets comes back at things, you know, he people feel better about Trump. And they're like, Oh, yeah, I really didn't want to vote for that guy. Look how bad Dems are. And now,

once again, we're grappling with Trump's his immigration. We're grappling with Elon calling him a pedophile saying he should be impeached. And so it doesn't surprise me that you're seeing his disapprove go up again. That's fascinating. You know, to that end, it's, it is always telling that on the ends of his campaigns, three times, he's kind of sheltered, right? Like he knows that he's, yeah, he knows that if he's in the news, it's not good for him. And so he just quiets. And also, it's kind of ironic because here's a guy who's insatiable about the spotlight. And it's just not good for him. And yet here he is. I will say I was a little bit surprised though, because especially on the economic numbers, obviously, when the tariffs were in the news, and the market was kind of teetering,

it made sense that his economic numbers were not great. But since Liberation Day, we've seen a lot of tacoing, if you want to call it that. The tariffs haven't- I do. Okay, cool. The tariffs haven't all gone into effect. It's kind of haphazard. The stock markets recovered a bit. There's been less inflation than expected.

I mean, the metrics aren't great, but they're nothing like the direness that we anticipated. And yet those economic numbers really haven't improved if you look at it. Yeah. Well, this is the same thing with Biden where when you talk about the macro economic numbers versus people's lived experience, what I hear in the focus groups from people, because this was the thing towards the end of Biden's term, going into the election, you'd hear people argue correctly that the macroeconomic picture was improving and improving fast. So why wasn't Biden getting more credit for that?

Well, the reason was prices are still very high. Just because inflation cools in a sense does not mean it is that only affects the rate at which prices are going up. It does not bring prices down. And when Trump made a promise to people that he was going to lower prices immediately, that got him elected. He was elected like that. Yes, there's a devoted MAGA coalition that is here for liberal tears, that's here for

the cruelty, whatever. There's a lot of people who just wanted stuff to be cheaper, housing, groceries, gas. And now that it's not, you are seeing that reflected in the numbers. You know better than I do because you have these focus groups. But is there that type of remorse when you talk to these people where they're like, wait a second, he promised me X, I'm not getting X. Oh, yes. So so in the focus group pod that that's going to come out this

weekend, which I did with our colleague, John Cohn. And Jonathan is one of the foremost experts on Medicaid, on healthcare policy. And so we have a really rich discussion, but he got to hear a lot of voters. And this is actually an important point. I was just talking about this on CNN. The MAGA coalition is different from the old school Republican coalition.

It includes a lot more low income voters. And so there's this woman and she's talking about how, look, she's glad that Trump is getting rid of criminal illegals. She's glad that they're doing something about the trans surgeries for kids. You know, and I hear a lot of that, but she's mad that he seems to be giving tax cuts to his rich friends and taking away her Medicaid and her SNAP benefits. So she was talking about how she lives with her, she's on disability, she's got a couple of kids, she gets $900 a month from the government. She's saying, I can't live on that. And if they roll this back, like it's over for me. And so they,

I think Republicans, and this is, you see this from Josh Hawley and other places that live in poor red states Where they're like a lot of our people get these oh, yeah It's a lot of us people are on these are get these government subsidies And so to do something is it politically perilous for Republicans almost more so than it was Previously because more people who are poor who do rely on these programs are now part of their voting coalition Yes, not just josh holley's jim justice of west virginia Who's been coming up saying the snap cuts are just totally unacceptable for his state switching topics a little bit because immigration is so in the news and it has been such a

potent issue for trump, but what you're seeing in these polls again is To me, I can't really tell if this is real. But if you look at that AP poll on immigration, Trump is 46% approved, 53% disapproved in terms of his handling. There was a Washington Post George Mason survey, which is kind of methodologically interesting because there was a thousand texts. I think it probably got people who were really engaged in following the news more so than usual polls, but whatever thousand texts They asked about Trump's handling of immigration including deportations 52% disapproved 37% approved that Quinnipiac poll which was really like harshly negative towards Trump

That's 43% approve on immigration 59% disapproved. I mean these are negative numbers on his signature issue, three polls. Again, I'm not sure if it's indicative of something larger, but certainly I think we can conclude from this that it's not as strong an issue as it once was for him. Yeah. Here's what's happening. Donald Trump and the entire MAGA coalition convinced people that so many of the people who had immigrated here were criminals, thugs, rapists, people that we needed out of our

country right away, MS-13 gang members. Here's the problem. Actually, the vast majority of people who are here illegally are law-abiding citizens. And the one crime they committed was when they crossed the border illegally. And so, you know, for some part of the Republican coalition, they think they're all criminals because they came here illegally.

But actually, there's sort of a bigger subset of Americans who sort of have that sense of like, well, there's this tacit agreement with we needed people for labor and yeah, people come here, but if they've been here for 20 years and they're not committing crimes, I don't care if they're here, like this is fine. And so he's running up against the fact

that there aren't enough criminals to deport. And so they've started deporting people from communities like Carol in Missouri, who overstayed her visa, who the entire community of Trump voters went, no, not our Carol. And you're seeing that play out in a lot of other communities where there are ices in the schools, ices in the restaurants, and they're like, this guy's not bothering anybody. And so this is always where sort of the rubber meets the road on policy is like, do you like

it when you get it? And I think, look, there are still plenty of people in the MAGA coalition who are like, get them all out of here. I don't want anybody here who came into this country illegally. But there's actually a majority of Americans who are like, well, just the criminals. But if someone's been here for 20 years, let's not mess with them. Are their kids are citizens? Like, I don't want you to tear their family apart. It's like that is the majority of Americans who don't want to see cruel and unusual things carried out. And Tim Miller and I talked about this on a video earlier today,

where Trump is now out there on a bleep, and like, you know, the great farmers of our country in the hotel and leisure executives, they need these people. Let's tone down what we're doing. All right, two fun ones for you. First, which one do you want first, Rasmussen or Musk? You choose. Ooh, well, let's do Rasmussen.

We're talking about polling. I want to show this Rasmussen, Rasmussen knows is going to shock you. They're going against the grain. Donald Trump, according to Rasmussen, is at 53% approval rating and they have an incredible Twitter graphic, which I want to pull up here. Where do they get this graphic? Trump approval is at 53% today. Up a point from yesterday. Trump the dawn.

What is that graphic? The pinstripe suit, the hat, the fuck around and find out graphic up there. The watermark. Here's what's funny about this for me is, okay. So Rasmussen, their thumb, their maga thumb that sits on their polling, actually what it makes me think is that these other polls are likely correct if Trump is only at 53% approval in Rasmussen and they think that at 53% he's crushing it like

We're sent barely a majority like let's not like I mean, it's good in modern for Trump Yeah, good modern polarized times but like that is I think both BS and also I mean It's classic Rastafarian. All right. Here's the better. Here's the more fun one So Quinnipiac buried in the pole they did ask about Elon Musk and you know, notably Shitty numbers of 30% approved 57% disapproved. But the best part was this among Republicans. He was at 62% favorable rating. It was 78% in March. So he torched his standing with MAGA by calling Trump a pedophile who probably should be impeached. And I don't have any tears to shed, I gotta be honest. Yeah, can I, I gotta give just a quick rant,

because this is what's on my heart, Sam. This is what's on my heart right now. It is this. It was like six days ago that Elon Musk took to Twitter, called Donald Trump a pedophile who should be impeached and was in the vaunted much sought after Epstein files, talked all kinds of smack about his bill, but it's very important, called him a pedophile, dropped a nuclear bomb saying it. And six days later, as we await the tanks in the streets

and as LA is in the middle of protests and cop crackdowns and the Marines have been deployed, no one is talking about this. Everyone has just stopped. Everyone's decided, oh, well, this is just two guys saying things back and forth to each other. I'm sorry. In a real society, in a real

political culture with actual journalists in it, people would say to themselves, I don't know, Trump's biggest collaborator who has been running the government with him for the first four months said he's in the Epstein files and called him a pedophile. Now either Trump is a pedophile and someone should be looking at that because we'd probably want to impeach him for that if there was proof and The corresponding cover-up that would be going on with the FBI and everybody else. That's a massive major nuclear level story or Or Elon Musk is a liar and is lying about the president United States being a pedophile which should Reputationally ruin him forever. He shouldn't be able to have government contracts.

And instead everybody's like, God, just two dudes, just two dudes. I'm going to Ketamine kick and the other president of the United States and unstable in his own, right? It's nutty. Even if you put away, put aside the Epstein stuff, which whatever, you can't really put it aside, but let's just say in any other reality, what if like John Podesta like came out and was like, you know, what Brock Obama should be impeached or like, you know, Carl Rove came.

That was like, you know what? George W Bush should be impeached. It's like, we would probably spend a little bit of time chewing on that one. Now I think it would be like a political earthquake, not a two day punchline. Well, that's everyone goes, my bad. Yeah. My B. But Sarah, that's Trump.

Man. I know I don't want to excuse it, but it's just like every, every day brings a new serious controversy and it makes it that this is why journalism is so difficult under Trump. I totally agree with you. Like, I understand the difficulty. I understand that it's difficult. And look, Donald Trump, he does feed this in his own way. I'm not saying he's deploying the Marines to LA to distract from us calling him a pedophile. I'm not saying

that directly. I do think the way that he lurches from crisis to crisis is something that we should have learned to grapple with by now because it's a very familiar pattern. And so being able to walk and chew gum to explore these things, to sit on a story that once you take a weekend break doesn't just die on the vine. This is insane to me. No, I agree with you. I mean, I think some of it's manifesting in these numbers that we're chewing over and

you yourself mentioned it like that being, but the idea that we just moved on is Nutty, it's nutty, but here we are. All right, Sarah. Thanks for doing this. Appreciate it. Looking forward to the focus group Talk to you later, Sarah. See you guys