Gallup ended its United States presidential approval rating polling in February after nearly 90 years of tracking the president’s job performance. Its last reading before that shift put Donald Trump at 36% approval and 59% disapproval in early December 2025.
Gallup and Donald Trump
Gallup said it ended the practice because of a "shift in corporate strategy" and said it will "focus more on issues and policy polling." That leaves one of the longest-running national measures of presidential standing out of the field just as Trump’s latest number showed a decline from 47% in early 2025, after he took office for the second time.
The early December poll gives readers a final Gallup benchmark for Trump before the company moved away from measuring presidential approval. For anyone comparing presidents across terms, that makes the last Gallup reading part of the record, not just a snapshot.
Other polls on Trump
Gallup’s exit does not end presidential approval polling altogether. The American Research Group found in mid-June that 30% of respondents approved of Trump’s job performance and 66% disapproved, while The and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found 37% approval and 62% disapproval in mid-June.
Those figures show why the Gallup change matters in practical terms: readers still have outside measures of Trump’s standing, but they no longer have Gallup’s long-running series to compare against older presidencies in the same way.
The 13-president comparison
The American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara compiled the final Gallup ratings for each presidential term over the past 70 years. That comparison placed Donald Trump among the presidents measured by Gallup, including Harry Truman, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Joe Biden, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan.
Two older cases stand out in the Gallup record. A Gallup poll conducted from December 11 to 16, 1952, found 56% of respondents disapproved of Truman’s handling of the presidency. Another Gallup poll surveyed from August 2 to 5, 1974, and found 66% disapproval for Nixon’s presidency; he resigned on August 9, 1974, while facing the threat of impeachment and removal.
Trump also carried a distinction in the Gallup record: he was the first president since Gallup began tracking presidential approval in the 1930s to never have a job approval rating above 50% during his first term. Carter’s early days produced high approval ratings and a disapproval rating in the single digits, before he lost the 1980 presidential election to Reagan.
The result is a split-screen for readers trying to follow presidential approval polls now. Gallup has stepped away from the presidential series, but other firms are still publishing approval numbers for Trump, and the old benchmark remains the one that still defines how presidents are ranked across time.
