Fox News Viewers Have No Clue Trump’s Approval Rating Has Cratered

President Donald Trump is currently enduring the most significant and sustained approval rating decline of his presidency, and the most-watched news network in America is virtually ignoring it.

The polling numbers are stark: Since the United States launched its war against Iran (a conflict that has sent gas prices past four dollars, rattled global markets, and undercut his core campaign promises on inflation and the economy) every major pollster has documented a president whose political standing is eroding across the board.

The University of Massachusetts Amherst put him at 33 percent overall, down from 44 percent a year ago. Quinnipiac, AP-NORC, YouGov, and Reuters all track the same direction. Among his own 2024 voters he’s down six points in five weeks. Among independents he has dropped to 22 percent. Fox News’s own pollsters found 64 percent of Americans disapproving of his Iran handling, 71 percent on inflation, 66 percent on the economy.

Polling guru Nate Silver summed it up thusly: “Trump has profound problems.”

Yesterday, I wrote about the strategic challenge of how Fox covers a populist president who is suddenly unpopular. I cited a handful of Fox voices who have, in limited but genuinely noteworthy ways, called balls and strikes on the Iran war. Laura Ingraham asking whether Trump was fully briefed. Stuart Varney alarmed about oil near $100 a barrel. Johnny Joey Jones publicly pleading to get out. These were real moments, worth acknowledging.

This piece, however, is about something more specific: the polls themselves, which are the most concrete and measurable evidence of Trump’s political standing, and how little attention Fox News has paid to a story its own pollsters are generating.

A search of available transcripts over the past month (via the media monitoring service Snapstream) is — by nature — imprecise. Seven days of full network programming across multiple shows cannot be fine-tooth combed with complete confidence. But transcript searches are directionally reliable, and the narrative they reveal here is striking. I could find substantive discussion about Trump’s approval numbers surfaces in essentially three moments.

First, there was Bret Baier, who confronted Speaker Mike Johnson with the Fox poll data on March 26, but prefaced it by noting that “the president doesn’t love Fox News polls” — an anchor flagging his own network’s credibility problem before sharing accurate numbers with his audience.

It wasn’t hard to understand why. Trump himself had called into The Five a week ago Thursday and told the hosts their pollsters were terrible, adding that Rupert Murdoch had been promising to fire them for years. By the time Baier sat down with Johnson, the apology was almost reflexive.

Last Friday, Fox Business reporter Edward Lawrence told Dana Perino on America’s Newsroom that the president is “on the clock with the American people,” citing the Fox polling before the segment moved on. Last Monday, Baier acknowledged a “downward turn clearly in recent weeks” to Brit Hume, then immediately turned the conversation toward what the No Kings protest movement means for Democrats in November.

There are isolated other examples like Jacqui Heinrich briefly reporting the Fox News Poll numbers the day they broke, and weekend anchor Jon Scott making a brief mention, but the moments mentioned above delivered one preemptive apology, one a brief live report absorbed into a longer segment, and one a pivot to a different story before the thought had fully landed. From the most watched news network in the country, covering its own polling data about the president it has spent a decade amplifying.

The Baier-Johnson exchange is revealing. A Fox News anchor, armed with his own network’s survey data showing the president at significant lows, felt it necessary to note — before presenting a single number — that Trump doesn’t like them. That preface wasn’t a journalistic caveat. It was Baier telling his audience, before showing them anything, that the president resents the source. Johnson took the handoff smoothly — yes the numbers are real, gas prices, the war will end soon, the tax cut is coming — and 90 seconds later the subject had changed.

Which makes it all the more notable that Miranda Devine went where Fox wouldn’t. The Fox News contributor, New York Post columnist and reliable Trump defender posted side-by-side RCP approval graphs this week with a single observation: Trump’s polls since the Iran war started look a lot like Biden’s after the Afghanistan withdrawal. She didn’t hedge it. A Fox-friendly voice, on her own, reached for the single most humiliating foreign policy collapse of the Biden presidency as the relevant comparison. If that framing can appear in the New York Post, the question of why Fox can’t sustain a full segment on the same data is worth asking out loud.

The exception that proves the pattern is Jessica Tarlov, the reliably outnumbered liberal voice on The Five, who this week did what almost no one else on the network has done — she read the numbers out loud and let them land. His approval is now in the 30s across every poll. Minus 24 with men. Minus 17 with seniors. Sixty-five percent say his policies are making their economic conditions worse. “That is unsustainable,” she said flatly. It was a rare moment of the data being treated as the story rather than a brief interruption before the next segment. That it fell to Fox’s designated liberal to say it plainly tells you something about who on that network has license to state the obvious.

Fox’s approach to the polling story resembles nothing so much as a local sports network covering a bad season for the home team. The standings get mentioned when they’re impossible to avoid. The implications don’t. The audience gets told the score and then, quickly, something else. Because the more the fans hear about their team losing, the more they want to fire the coach.

When a president’s most loyal viewers are never asked to reckon with his worst numbers, the political pressure that might otherwise force accountability simply never builds.

This approach clearly works as a content strategy. It’s a strange way to run a news organization, particularly when your viewers are trying to form judgments about a war being fought in their name, a president whose core promises are underwater, and an economy moving in the wrong direction. The transcript record — imprecise as any such search must be — suggests Fox has decided those viewers don’t need to sit with the numbers long enough to draw their own conclusions.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.

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