A majority of American voters believe that President Donald Trump has gone too far in his use of presidential power as his first year back in the Oval Office draws to a close, according to a new survey.
After a rollercoaster year of tariffs, ICE raids, National Guard deployments, strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean and Pacific, and the partial demolition of the White House, 54 percent of respondents to the latest Quinnipiac University poll said they feel Trump has exceeded his authority.
Another 37 percent said they believed he has got the balance broadly right, and a further 7 percent said, perhaps surprisingly, that he has not gone far enough.
“Is the often-described ‘most powerful person in the world’ wielding too much power? More than half of Americans believe President Trump has crossed that line,” said Quinnipiac analyst Tim Malloy.
Overall, the institution found Trump's approval rating at 40 percent, with 54 percent disapproving of his job performance, numbers unchanged from Quinnipiac’s last poll in late October.
The score is five points higher than the 35 percent he received in the same institution’s equivalent poll in December 2017, the final month of his first year in office as the 45th president.
By comparison, Joe Biden was scoring in the mid-40s in December 2021, from a low of 40 percent in a Monmouth University poll conducted that month to a high of 49 percent in a contemporaneous CNN survey.
Quinnipiac’s latest study, conducted between December 11 and 15, also found respondents taking issue with Trump’s handling of eight specific issues, with a majority disapproving in each case.
This included 55 percent of people taking part saying they disapproved of his leadership on foreign trade, compared to 40 percent in favor, 57 percent taking exception to his stewardship of the U.S. economy, compared to 40 percent in favor, and 59 percent expressing dissatisfaction with the job he is doing on healthcare, compared to the 34 percent who were positive.
On immigration, 54 percent said they disapproved of his brutal crackdown on undocumented migrants, while 44 percent approved. On deportations specifically, 55 percent of respondents opposed, and 42 percent favored.
On foreign policy, 54 percent were negative and just 41 percent positive, perhaps suggesting the public is unconvinced by Trump’s repeated claims to have prevented at least eight wars.
Drilling down into the economic unease, 64 percent of voters told Quinnipiac they considered the rising cost of living in the United States a very serious problem, 28 percent said it was a serious problem, and 5 percent said it was not a serious problem. Just two percent said they did not consider affordability a problem at all.
Those results echo the latest NPR/PBS News/Marist poll published earlier this week, which showed that 57 percent disapproved of Trump’s handling of the economy, with only 36 percent approving.
U.S. inflation spiked 2.7 percent over the past 12 months on Thursday morning, data published hours after Trump delivered a primetime address on national television in which he again insisted the U.S. economy was in robust shape.
“Wages are up, prices are down. Our nation is strong. America is respected, and our country is back stronger than ever before. We are poised for an economic boom the likes of which the world has never seen,” the president insisted in a highly partisan speech.
However, Quinnipiac found that only 34 percent of Americans hold the Democrats responsible for the current state of the economy, with 57 percent seeing Trump as the man accountable.
Another red warning flag for the president revealed by the poll, as Friday’s deadline for the release of the Department of Justice’s files on Jeffrey Epstein approaches, is that 65 percent of Americans disapprove of his handling of the scandal, with just 26 percent contented.
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