
Gage Skidmore / Wikimedia Commons
Two weeks into his second term, President Donald Trump’s newfound popularity has stunned many observers in the media.
After a first term in which his approval ratings mostly hovered around 40% – never once passing the 50% threshold – Trump’s current rosy reception paints a drastically different picture.
The Democratic Party – fresh off of losing the presidency and the Senate, and failing to regain control of the House – finds itself in the political wilderness, meanwhile, with its highest unfavorable rating in at least a generation.
But is the 45th and now 47th president’s remarkable comeback due to a change in his approach, or an attitude shift among the American electorate? A recent exchange on CNN perfectly illustrated both sides of that ongoing debate among news personnel.
“This is a very different Donald Trump. He’s leading a very different administration,” CNN Senior Writer and Political Analyst Harry Enten said during a Jan. 26th broadcast. “And the American public is very much more in line with him than they were at any point during his entire first term.”
CNN hostess Kate Bolduan disagreed with Enten, countering: “This is not a very different Donald Trump. This is a very different Donald Trump as being viewed by voters in this moment.”
Enten explained that he was referring to the way Trump is currently “going about things,” with Susie Wiles serving as his second-term White House Chief of Staff. “I think he is going at things in a much less disorganized fashion, much more organized.”
Enten pointed to a monitor showing, side by side, Trump’s highest net approval rating during his first term (+3%, recorded in March 2017) and his current net approval rating (+6%, recorded in January 2025).
“It was so interesting to me that Donald Trump’s first net approval rating of his second term is higher than his entire first term,” Enten indicated. “And I was interested. Has that ever happened?”
“Donald Trump is the first guy ever whose net approval rating in the first month of his second term is higher than any rating he had in his entire first term, Kate Bouldan,” the analyst said.
Bouldan interjected, “I have a really hard time believing this.”
“This is 100% true,” Enten assured her. “This is true, I don’t make stuff up. The numbers are the numbers.”
On last Monday’s episode of The Hill’s “Rising,” co-hosts Robby Soave and Niall Stanage reflected on the heated CNN exchange between Enten and Bouldan.
Soave said of Trump: “From the perspective of the things he’s trying to accomplish … his base is very happy with what they’re seeing in terms of the appointments. …He has become more popular over time.”
Stanage replied: “It’s certainly true that his approval ratings right now are pretty strong.” However he added that he did not “quite get why” Bouldan “was quite so shocked as she was.”
“Because,” Soave offered, “she lives in a little bubble where everyone hates Donald Trump?”
While the current president has, as Soave pointed out, become more popular – despite having received overwhelmingly negative media coverage over the years – the Democrats are polling at their lowest in the present political landscape.
CatholicVote reported last week a recent Quinnipiac University poll found that respondents overwhelmingly “disapprove of the Democratic Party (57% vs. 31% who approved).”
“However, respondents were more evenly split in their approval of the Republican Party, with 43% having favorable views and 45% with unfavorable ones,” CatholicVote added.
>> LAST WEEK: DEMOCRATS’ FAVORABILITY POLLING AT AN ‘UNPRECEDENTED’ LOW <<
The Washington Post noted in an analysis last Wednesday: “That’s not only a huge imbalance but also an unprecedented one.”
“In fact, Democrats’ 57 percent unfavorable rating is their highest ever in Quinnipiac’s polling, dating back to 2008, while the GOP’s 43 percent favorable rating is its highest ever,” the Post’s analysis added. “And while this is just one poll, it builds on evidence from other polls.”
The WaPo analysis specified: “If you expand the dataset to earlier CNN, USA Today and Gallup polls, it’s the party’s worst since at least 1992,” when Democrat Bill Clinton was comfortably elected president and ended 12 years of consecutive Republican rule in the White House.
And in fact, the elections of Bill Clinton in 1992 and Donald Trump 2024 have more in common than meets the eye.
During his first run for the White House, Clinton campaigned as a “Third-Way” moderate Democrat, distinct from the more unabashed liberalism of his party’s two previous failed nominees, Michael Dukakis (1988) and Walter Mondale (1984).
>> WHY HARRIS LOST: A CATHOLICVOTE TWO-PART EXPLAINER <<
While Clinton’s critics often charged him with not governing as a centrist, he continued his moderate rhetoric. While successfully campaigning for re-election in 1996, he famously declared in that year’s State of the Union address: “The era of big government is over.”
Just over nine months later, voters rewarded him with a resounding 379 Electoral Vote victory.
Like in the 1990s, voters today seem to crave a leader who presents himself as favoring common sense over frivolous ideological battles. Polling results today could be interpreted as Americans seeing Trump as delivering the former and the struggling Democrats as embodying the latter.
Upon his triumphant return to the White House, Trump immediately went to work signing a series of executive orders to protect women and children against the policy goals of a highly controversial “transgender” movement. Furthermore, just over a week into his term, Trump signed bipartisan legislation to combat illegal migrant crime, which had skyrocketed under the previous Biden administration.
Meanwhile, the Democrats this weekend selected a 24-year-old gun control activist – who had once expressed support for defunding the police and abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) – as vice chairman of the party’s National Committee (DNC).
Only time will tell if current trends continue, but currently the American public, by increasingly embracing Trump and abandoning the Democrats, may simply be choosing the side they see as delivering results rather than pushing out-of-touch narratives.
