U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 11, 2026. REUTERS/Annabelle Gordon
With the United States' 2026 midterms roughly six and one-half months away, President Donald Trump continues to suffer from weak approval ratings. Polls released in April show Trump's approval rating at 38 percent (Quinnipiac and YouGov/The Economist), 37 percent (Survey Monkey/NBC News) or 43 percent (Zogby).
In an opinion column published on April 21, The Guardian's Moira Donegan attributes Trump's obsession with culture-war issues to his low approval ratings.
"Trump's approval rating is plummeting to new lows, and his working-class support is crumbling," Donegan explains. "He won a second term on the back of ordinary Americans' widespread anger at inequality and dissatisfaction with their economic prospects, and yet, his return to office has been marked instead with a fixation on culture-war grievances that many of those supporters find alienating."
Donegan argues that Trump's victory over Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in the 2024 election was primarily fueled by concerns about the economy — not "culture-war" obsessions.
"Was a narrow victory in one close presidential election really a sign of a broad and permanent cultural shift?," Donegan writes. "Less than 18 months later, that thesis has collapsed. Trump and his allies have delivered an era of backlash and cultural retrenchment from the executive branch: slashing grants for 'woke' research, turning federal programs meant to promote equality into engines for discrimination, stymying promotions for women and people of color in the armed services in what critics say is an effort to resegregate the military, and pressuring athletic conferences from the National Collegiate Athletic Association to the International Olympic Committee to ban trans women athletes."
Although the 2024 election was quite close — Trump won the national popular vote by roughly 1.5 percent — he expanded his support among Latinos, independents, swing voters, tech bros, the Manosphere and Generation Z.
But according to Donegan, that 2024 coalition is falling apart.
"Now, ahead of November's midterm congressional elections, Trump is increasingly unpopular, failing in his major policy initiatives and presiding over a fracturing coalition," the liberal Guardian opinion columnist observes. "The Democrats, ever eager to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, have yet to put forward a coherent agenda to counter him. But maybe they don't need to. Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake."