Trump’s Approval Rating Is Cratering. Tariffs Are a Big Reason Why.

Donald Trump is now an unpopular president. Some of this dissatisfaction is due to the war in Iran. Some of it springs from the unanticipated speed, chaos, and perceived brutality of several of his administration’s actions over the past year and a half. But a significant part of his political problem has a straightforward economic explanation: Everything feels expensive, and his tariffs are a major reason why.

If the president wants to help himself and his party ahead of this year’s midterm elections, the most effective thing he can do is eliminate the tariffs. The evidence in favor of this move is overwhelming, and it comes from his own tenure.

As an obligatory reminder, tariffs are levied on American importers who pass the costs on to American businesses and consumers. Those insisting tariffs are “paid by foreigners” must now dispute not just history but the present.

The Cato Institute’s Scott Lincicome and colleagues reviewed a year of data from Trump’s tariff regime and found that “the higher costs from tariffs passed through to prices paid by Americans at a rate as high as 96 percent.”

Using daily price data from major U.S. retailers, economists from Harvard Business School found that the 2025 tariffs raised consumer prices almost immediately, with imported goods rising roughly twice as fast as domestic ones and adding nearly a full percentage point to the overall Consumer Price Index by October 2025.

This finding isn’t unique. My colleague Jack Salmon examined 56 quantitative studies produced over the last 30 years and found 19 showing tariffs raise prices and zero showing tariffs lower prices.

This reality has a real impact on Americans. The Tax Foundation put the cost of the tariffs at roughly $1,000 per American household in 2025, with another $700 coming in 2026 from the Section 232 and Section 122 levies, which were left unaffected by Supreme Court’s recent rebuke. It shows up in grocery bills, appliance prices, and clothing costs—routine purchases for working-class households.

The damage goes beyond prices. Salmon’s literature review finds 25 studies documenting negative effects of tariffs on productivity and economic output. None of those studies show positive effects. Across Chile, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Hungary, Canada, and the United States, the pattern is the same: Lower tariffs raise productivity; higher tariffs reduce it.

What about revenue? The Tax Foundation projects $956 billion from the remaining tariffs over a decade, falling to $697 billion once the economic damage, including the uncertainty and foreign retaliation, is counted. That’s a sign of a bad policy.

To be fair, some supporters of Trump’s tariffs were honest about their impact. Isn’t that the whole point? Raise prices and hurt the businesses reliant on foreign goods and inputs to help domestic manufacturers. We’re told that conceding to the working-class white voters who demand protectionism is worth the price.

The political results are now available for inspection too. A new CBS News poll shows that Trump’s approval is underwater with most voters, including white voters without college degrees, among whom his approval rating fell from 68 percent last year to 46 percent today. This is unsurprising. The supposed beneficiaries of economic nationalism are instead its most exposed victims.

It didn’t help that manufacturing employment, which was promised to boom, kept declining throughout 2025. And economic growth decelerated despite the major investment and energy around AI.

The tariffs also produced a final insult: They energized the very Washington insiders the president promised to defeat when he first entered the White House in 2017. When tariffs are numerous, arbitrary, and have an exemption process attached, every affected business must hire a lobbyist to survive.

Data from Lincicome and his co-authors show that “the number of registered clients for tariff-related lobbying increased by 218 percent in 2025 with respect to the previous year.…Meanwhile, trade-related lobbying expenditures reached more than $900 million in the first half of 2025 alone and were 28 percent higher than in the first half of 2024.”

All that lobbying pays off, as evidenced by how the global tariffs have become riddled with exemptions. It’s also good for lawyers. More than 2,000 importers have now rightfully filed suits (an expensive process) seeking refunds on over $160 billion in tariffs the Supreme Court ruled were illegally collected.

The swamp was not drained. It was fed. Small businesses, who usually do not have the luck or resources to access the right people in the administration, pay the full tariff while their larger competitors petition for relief.

The president still has time to change course. The economic case for dropping the tariffs is airtight. The political case is increasingly urgent.

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