President Trump’s job approval rating has fallen steadily during his first three months in office, according to a New York Times average of polling.

Trump’s approval rating has sunk to about 45 per cent, down from 52 per cent one week after he took office. Around half of the country now disapproves of his performance, the polling shows.

American presidents typically enter office with a groundswell of support that wanes over time. But Trump’s approval has been dropping slightly faster than that of his predecessors.

Trump started his term with the second-lowest approval rating for a president in modern history. The only recent president to have started in a worse position was Trump the first time he took office.

The polling average, assembled by The New York Times, includes nearly all publicly released polls that track Trump’s approval rating. The goal of a polling average is to balance the biases of individual polls, which can vary in quality and frequency, and to make it easier to track changes in public opinion over time.

The average does not address the causes of the decline in approval, or whether they are driven by specific actions like his enactment of tariffs, his threats towards allies

Across all polls, Trump’s numbers continued to fall after he issued global tariffs by executive order. Though few polls have been conducted before and after the tariff announcement, most showed no major decline.

New York Times News Service