MSN
Trump is trapped in an 'ugly place politically' after only 14 months: expert
April 6, 2026 7:48AM ET
Donald Trump visits a Ford factory in Dearborn, Michigan earlier this month. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
During an appearance on MS NOW on Monday morning, longtime political analyst John Heilemann pointed out that Donald Trump's approval numbers during his second term have been in a freefall with no hope for a turnaround in sight.
Speaking with the hosts of “Morning Joe,” Heilemann was unable to come up with one time when the embattled president saw any enduring upward swing in his polling.
For that, he suggested, the president has only himself to blame for his unpopular war in Iran, which has critically hurt him with some of his hardcore supporters, as the main culprit.
Pointing to the president’s prime address to the nation last week, which the analyst said “lacked that kind of Trump big lunatic energy,” he added that the stunning and vulgar Truth Social post on Easter by Trump was a sign that he has lost the plot.
‘’I think this is driving up the question for a lot of voters about whether the president is, I don't know what the right word is,” he admitted. “The most recent polling on this was he is becoming more erratic with age, which is kind of the kind of gentle way of putting it.”
“But there is that conversation, which eventually became a huge problem for Joe Biden, is now starting to creep into the conversation,” he elaborated. “And as part of what is a really stunning decline in public approval for Donald Trump, where he's now sitting at a place and on a trajectory that looks a lot like George W. Bush in his second term.”
“He is not ever, in the course of 14 months in office, his numbers have gone nowhere but down,” he reported. “Occasionally, they have plateaued, but he's not had a bump anywhere in 14 months. That is a very ugly place to be politically.”
“I don't know what's going on in his head, but he's in a very bad place in terms of the way the public is looking at this war, the consequences of this war and what they think, what they find confusing and indecipherable about his rationale for waging it,” he added.
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