Trump is above water by 2.6 percentage points in the national RealClearPolitics polling average, albeit with significant differences in the results found by various pollsters. Yet even his worst current poll numbers are better than where he was for most of his first term.

An average of 41% approved of Trump’s job performance from 2017 to 2021, according to Gallup, with the pollster finding his last job approval rating was just 34%.

Trump’s improved numbers suggest that so far, voters aren’t recoiling from his first weeks in office or the saturation-level media coverage of the Trump administration. Trump won the popular vote for the first time in three tries in 2024, receiving 49.8% to former Vice President Kamala Harris’s 48.3%.

A CBS News-YouGov poll taken this month found 53% approved of the job Trump was doing so far, with 70% saying he was doing what he promised to do in the campaign. In this survey, 69% described Trump as tough, 63% energetic, 60% focused, and 58% effective.

These are all impressions Trump has been trying to make, especially in contrast with former President Joe Biden. Trump greeted Marc Fogel, an American former hostage freed from Russian captivity, in the middle of the night at the White House. Trump attended the Super Bowl, a first for a sitting president. He has taken questions from the press frequently. He has issued a slew of executive orders aimed at quickly fulfilling campaign promises. He has muscled through Cabinet picks that initially seemed to elicit skepticism from Republican senators and appears to be moving toward diplomacy to end Russia’s war in Ukraine. 

During the presidential campaign, Trump’s retrospective job approval rating was often higher than it was when he was originally in office. An October NBC News poll found it was 5 points higher than Biden’s real-time approval rating. CBS, CNN, and Gallup were among the pollsters who found majority approval of the Trump transition process before he returned to the Oval Office.

Trump was quiet at times as his poll numbers rebounded. True, he was never completely out of the news, grabbing seemingly negative headlines due to his indictments and legal problems. He was nevertheless not as omnipresent as he was from June 2015 to January 2021. As Biden’s reelection campaign imploded after their sole presidential debate, Trump largely stayed mum.

During the transition, Trump was seen at fighting matches and other public events. But he largely hunkered down at Mar-a-Lago, plotting appointments and early moves. It was muted compared to his whirlwind end to the campaign.

Trump’s improved poll numbers have so far survived his return to being everywhere all the time again, as well as an uptick in Democratic attacks on his policies. 

There are two caveats, however. Some polls still find Trump more polarizing than popular. YouGov sampled people in the CBS poll where a majority approved of the job Trump is doing, but a poll of registered voters the firm conducted this month for the Economist found 47% approved and 49% disapproved. This disconnect seems consistent with Trump’s strong performance with low-propensity voters last year.

More importantly, even Trump’s best polls show him vulnerable to a bad news cycle. Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush both hovered around 90% job approval after the Persian Gulf War and the initial response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, respectively. Neither were able to sustain those kinds of numbers. The elder Bush lost his reelection bid and Bush the younger had approval ratings as low as 25% during his final year in office. 

It is probably impossible for a national political figure in 2025 to have poll numbers as high as the Bushes briefly did. But it wouldn’t take anywhere near as big of a drop to put Trump closer to his first-term popularity average.

Trump’s base appears more animated than at almost any time in the last 10 years while his opponents seem unsure of how to proceed, arguably making him more powerful than ever. But unless carefully maintained, polls and political power can be fleeting.