There’s no other way to put it: The most recent Associated Press-NORC poll was a disaster for President Donald Trump. Sixty-seven percent of Americans disapproved of his presidency, up seven percentage points in one month. His approval was down five percentage points over the same period to 33%. On immigration, his strongest issue, his approval was 40%; on the war with Iran, 32%; on the economy, 30%; and on cost of living, 23%.
That was just a single survey, but several brutal new polls have been released in the past week. YouGov put Trump’s approval/disapproval at 37%/59%, CNBC put it at 40%/58% and Reuters-Ipsos put it at 36%/62%. The president has been below 40% in most polling averages, such as The New York Times’ and G. Elliott Morris’ FiftyPlusOne. Instead of a “vibe shift” that permanently reshaped the parties’ coalitions, the voting groups who moved right in 2024 have fled the president in droves.
And there’s still nearly three years to go.
The president’s own political advisers don’t expect things to improve either.
What could Trump’s remaining 34 months in office look like? We need only rewind the clock to the last Republican before Trump, George W. Bush, to study the effects of a politically toxic GOP president. The decay of the Bush presidency can tell us a lot about how Republicans will handle the president’s risible polls — and the one error of the post-Bush years that Democrats would be wise to not repeat.
Bush emerged from the 2004 election in an incredibly strong position. Unlike Trump, he won a narrow majority of the popular vote. For the second congressional election in a row, Republicans expanded their House and Senate majorities, to 232 and 55 seats, respectively. Conservatives dismissed despairing and angry liberals as suffering from “Bush derangement syndrome” (sound familiar?).
“I earned capital in the campaign, political capital,” Bush said in his first press conference after the election, “and I intend to spend it.”
Spend it he did, on an ambitious attempt to privatize Social Security. That effort fizzled. The war in Iraq sank deeper into a quagmire, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans and his administration was seen as indifferent and incompetent in the aftermath. The economy toppled, then crashed.
At the start of his second term, Bush’s approval rating was above 50%. It dropped and dropped — into the 40s in 2005, the 30s in 2006 and, by 2008, it was below 30%.
Three years is a long time in politics. It’s not impossible that Trump’s fortunes turn around, or at least that the consistently downward trend in his polls flattens out. But the headwinds he faces are gale-force. Peace talks with Iran stop and start; even if an agreement is reached, the Pentagon has told Congress it could take six months to clear the Strait of Hormuz of mines. So the economic fallout from the war will continue — and spread beyond gas prices. Costs for food companies, for example, rose nearly 8% year-over-year in March, according to Bloomberg, versus 4.2% in February.
If that sounds like “Trump derangement syndrome,” the president’s own political advisers don’t expect things to improve either. Their plan for the midterm elections, CNN reported, is “centered on messaging the midterms as a stark choice between the two parties’ platforms, rather than a direct referendum on the success of Trump’s presidency.”
A Republican administration that lied the country into a war has been succeeded by one that has consistently displayed utter contempt for the laws of this country.
So what can Bush’s second term tell us about Trump’s second? Expect more Republicans to try to distance themselves from the president whom they had enthusiastically supported. When Bush’s fortunes worsened, some on the right declared him insufficiently supportive of small government. Others said he was too pro-immigrant. Pundits, such as Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham, declared Bush too “stupid” to be president. (In 2026, we have already seen talking heads such as Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly discover areas of disagreement with Trump.)
If Trump’s unpopularity persists, the 2008 GOP primary may provide a preview of the 2028 contest. The toxicity of the Bush brand likely played a role in Arizona Sen. John McCain, Bush’s rival for the 2000 GOP presidential nomination, winning the nod in 2008. McCain was a strong supporter of the war in Iraq, including the 2007 troop surge. But the nastiness of the 2000 primary meant McCain could still distance himself from the sitting president.
Over 10 years of Trump as candidate or president has thinned the GOP’s non-Trumpian ranks to nonexistence. But a weakened MAGA brand could help someone such as Marco Rubio, who, though currently secretary of state, has also exchanged barbs with Trump in the past.
The most important lesson from Bush’s final years, though, is how Democrats should handle accountability for Trump and those around them. Then, as now, many Democratic voters wanted to impeach the president. Then, as now, a Democratic House looks ever more likely and a Democratic Senate increasingly possible.
Should both chambers flip, the president richly deserves impeachment for a host of high crimes and misdemeanors, and Democrats should get Republicans on the record regarding Trump’s removal from office. But Democrats should also be realistic: when Nixon resigned, the Democratic caucus counted 57 senators, beyond even the most optimistic 2026 scenarios. And a Gallup poll taken just before Nixon’s resignation, for instance, found 31% of Republicans supported his removal — still a minority, but a far greater share of Republicans than wanted Trump ousted right after Jan. 6.
Without impeachment, what does accountability look like? While congressional Democrats were active in holding hearings and conducting investigations during Bush’s final two years, the push for accountability died out after he left the White House.
“We need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” former President Barack Obama said shortly before taking office in 2009. He was specifically rebutting calls to investigate intelligence agencies’ use of torture and domestic spying during the Bush administration. But the sentiment applied more broadly to Obama’s time in office. There were no investigations into the Bush White House’s false claims leading up to the invasion of Iraq. The sentiment of “turn the page” even extended to Wall Street’s role in crashing the economy.
Many warned at the time that this attitude risked perpetuating a culture of impunity. In the years since, those warnings have been thoroughly vindicated. Democrats cannot make the same mistake twice.
A Republican administration that lied the country into a war has been succeeded by one that has consistently displayed utter contempt for the laws of this country. Wealthy Americans, including Trump’s family and biggest donors, enrich themselves further or buy their way out of consequences; big businesses and the markets presume they are “too big to fail.” These attitudes must be eradicated; nothing less is acceptable in a healthy democracy. That starts with holding Trump and the corrupt actors around him accountable, and it cannot stop when he is no longer president. The nation needs truth and consequences.
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