Trump’s GOP Unity is Starting to Fracture

Ten different splits happening right now.

“My poll numbers just went down,” President Trump admitted on Wednesday. “But with smart people,” he added, “they’ve gone way up.”

This was notable for at least three reasons:

1. Most presidents probably wouldn’t discuss polling averages at an event that was titled the “U.S.-Saudi Investment Forum.”

2. Most presidents probably wouldn’t imply that a segment of Americans are dumb. Certainly, they normally wouldn’t do this about voters who might otherwise be persuaded to support them: by definition, the people bringing Trump’s numbers down are voters who once approved of him but no longer do — which means their opinion is liable to change, and they could likely be brought be over to his side once again. Insulting their intelligence probably isn’t the way to do it.

3. Trump’s poll numbers have gone down before, and he normally doesn’t acknowledge it. Instead, he usually insists the polls are fake and provides alternative numbers that purport to show his success. It is rare to see Trump publicly grappling with declining poll numbers like this.

In fairness, the president has good reason to be admitting to a polling slide for basically the first time in his career: his numbers are not looking good right now!

According to the Silver Bulletin average, Trump’s approval rating is now down to 41.5%, a 10-point drop since January. After reaching majority approval for the first time in either of his terms upon returning to office this year, his approval is now roughly back to the level it lingered at for most of his first term, when he was a historically unpopular president.

Silver Bulletin shows him seven points underwater on immigration and 20 points underwater on the economy — two issues on which he’s historically polled well. (Even worse, his average approval rating for handling inflation is 34 points underwater.) A Fox News poll released yesterday recorded his disapproval rating at 58%, higher than it has been in any Fox polling ever. 76% of voters said in the poll that they view the economy negatively — even more than the 70% who said the same at the end of Joe Biden’s term. Fox found more than 60% of the country disapproving of Trump’s handling of the economy, tariffs, and health care.

An NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found his approval rating at its lowest level in their poll since just after January 6, 2021 — while showing Democrats with their largest advantage (a 14-point edge) in a generic congressional ballot poll … since November 2017, this exact same point in Trump’s first term.

Trump also suffered a major loss last night when he signed a bill, under duress, to release the Epstein files. He is reversing some of his signature tariffs (at the same time as the Supreme Court could soon overturn more of them), an implicit acknowledgement of their political toxicity. A court ruling in Texas means that Republicans might end up losing seats on net from the mid-decade redistricting wars they started at Trump’s urging. His revenge prosecutions are struggling. After a drubbing in this month’s elections, and a government shutdown they were blamed for, Republicans are even worrying about a December special election in a Trump +22 House seat.

There are a few more ugly data points coming in this morning’s newsletter, but before we continue, I want to pause to note that this is not a “The walls are closing in on Trump!” column. My job is to tell you the facts, and this is where the facts stand right now.

But that doesn’t mean you should interpret this round of bad news for Trump as anything more than it is, because it is incredibly normal for a president to be going through a patch like this at this point in his presidency.

Nobody knows whether to treat this Trump administration as a first term or a second term for purposes of data like this (obviously in an objective sense, it’s his second term, but also it’s not as if he was president for the last four years, so it’s reasonable to think Americans could be treating this more like the first year of a presidency than the fifth). So, in the chart below, I simply took each president’s average approval ratings on the first and 305th day (which is today for Trump) of their first and (when applicable) second terms.

As you can see, the decline Trump is going through right now is pretty consistent with the past few presidents.

In fact, Trump’s trajectory this term (51.6% ➡️ 41.5%) is basically identical to the dips in Obama’s second term (51.5% ➡️ 41%) and Biden’s one term (51.7% ➡️ 42.5%). It also tracks closely with Trump’s seven-point dip in the initial 10 months of his first term and the 12-point dip in the same period of George W. Bush’s second term. (Obama followed essentially the same pattern in his first term, with his approval rating dropping considerably by November of his first year, though the decline is larger — 18 points — mostly because he started out from such a high approval rating.)

There are outliers at the beginning of the dataset — Bill Clinton’s approval rating didn’t budge much in the first 10 months of either of his terms; Bush’s shot up after 9/11 — but the decline Trump is experiencing now was seen during each of the last five presidential terms (in some cases, down to the exact same numbers). Trump’s drop in popularity should be very much an unsurprising phenomenon.

This basically tracks with a thesis I’ve been advancing since, well, Day 3 of Trump’s second term. For all the abnormalities Donald Trump brings to our politics, if you’ve been analyzing his presidency like the normal rules of political gravity apply to him, you’ll have been a lot closer to guessing what would happen at each stage than if you haven’t.

President gets elected narrowly. Winning party thinks they’ve won a permanent majority. Losing party despairs. Winning party overreads their mandate. President takes unpopular actions. Voters don’t like it. Problems they wanted fixed remain. New problems crop up. President’s approval rating dips. Losing party becomes winning party in off-year and midterm elections. Winning party becomes losing party. (The rules of journalism say I have to pretend to be surprised by each of those developments, in order to generate maximum clicks. But we don’t have to play by those rules, do we?)

This pattern has held true for each of the most recent presidencies, and it has shown no signs of changing for this one. Take in any information about Trump’s polling deficit or the 2026 generic ballot with this lens.

It is fashionable to treat Trump like he is constantly defying political gravity — and let’s be clear: sometimes he does. But out of the five election cycles in which he has played a major part, his party has really only won two of them (2016 and 2024, both narrowly). None of the imitators who have tried to ape Trump’s style on the political scene have managed to shake off scandal and controversy in the same way — and even Trump himself hasn’t managed to do so most of the time, in the sense that he has been relatively unpopular for all of the last 10 years and has gone 1-for-3 in the presidential popular vote over that time. His two presidential election victories were improbable, impressive, and deeply consequential. But nothing that has happened after either one of them suggests that normal political patterns don’t apply to him.

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Humans are forgetful, though, and Republican lawmakers are only human.

So Trump has been treated by GOP members of Congress (and, in fairness, others too) for much of his current presidency like he won the Mandate of Heaven in the last election, and has benefitted from an unusual amount of party unity.

Congressional votes, like on short-term spending bills and debt ceiling legislation, that Republicans normally hate to take were taken without question once Trump asked them to. Long-running intraparty spats temporarily faded away.

But members of Congress ultimately care most about their next election, so it probably isn’t surprising that they’ve noticed — however belatedly — that Donald Trump is actually not a very popular president, and some have started to act on that basis.

Again, this isn’t “walls are closing in” stuff. It’s normal for members of the president’s party in Congress to break with the president on some issues, so the splits below should be treated as such — but it’s still notable that so many are happening right now, all at once, considering these breaks were so rare for the last 10 months.

Below follows an (incomplete) list of the intra-Republican Party spats playing out right now. Not all of them involve Trump directly, but all of them serve to dim the party unity narrative that defined the GOP for the beginning stretch of his second term.

Here goes:

1. The Epstein Files. You already know the deal here, so I won’t belabor the point. But let’s just say this: President Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act into law last night after it was passed almost unanimously by the Republican-led Congress, and that is not something he wanted to happen, even if he may have pretended otherwise at the last minute. (Look no further than his frantic campaign to get signers of the discharge petition to reverse themselves). Trump antagonists like Thomas Massie (R-KY) and ally-turned-antagonist Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) battled Trump on this — and won.

2. Thune vs. Johnson, part 1. Not only was the Epstein vote an embarrassment for Trump; it was for House Speaker Mike Johnson, too. Johnson spent all of Tuesday saying he was only voting for the Epstein bill because he had talked to Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Johnson was confident that the measure would be changed in the Senate to account for concerns he repeatedly laid out. Then, the bill was approved by the Senate without any of the changes that Johnson said were in the offing.

3. Thune vs. Johnson, part 2. That’s not the only point of disconnect for the two Republican congressional leaders, who have generally been on the same page since taking charge in January. Johnson admitted to being blindsided by the inclusion of a provision in last week’s spending bill that allows Senate Republicans whose phone records were obtained by the Biden-era FBI to sue for up to $500,000; the speaker said he was “surprised and frustrated” by the provision. On Wednesday, the House voted 426-0 on a bill to repeal the provision — a striking signal for House Republicans to send their Senate counterparts. One Republican congressman is so steamed about the whole thing that he introduced a resolution that would authorize Johnson to bring a lawsuit challenging the provision as unconstitutional if Thune doesn’t hold a vote on the new House bill. “The House is going to do what they’re going to do with it,” Thune said before the vote, not sounding especially concerned. “It didn’t apply to them.”

4. Trump vs. Indiana. The president has repeatedly urged Indiana Republicans to redraw their congressional map to hand the GOP an extra seat; Vice President JD Vance has made two trips to Indiana as part of the lobbying campaign. But the state Senate voted Tuesday to adjourn until January instead of following Trump’s wishes, with enough GOP state legislators opposed to the redrawing. Trump is now threatening primary challenges against the holdouts.

5. Health care. Trump is trying to replace Obamacare, but Republicans have no consensus on what should come in its place. (Party like it’s 2017?) Moderate Republicans are pushing GOP leadership to extend the enhanced Obamacare tax credits; conservatives say they won’t accept that (and Trump says he wouldn’t sign it into law). All factions agree the problem needs to be addressed, but each members seems to have a different plan in mind.

6. Cruz v. Carlson. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and talk show host Tucker Carlson aren’t the only combatants here, but this is the broader fight roiling Trump’s coalition over whether to platform Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist, antisemitic activist who recently appeared on Carlson’s show. Cruz has taken up the banner of bashing Carlson for the move; some conservative like Heritage Foundation presidents Kevin Roberts defended the former Fox host, though Roberts has since backtracked after a staff revolt that has caused a crisis within the think tank.

7. Tariff revenue. President Trump wants to send $2,000 checks to Americans from the revenue generated by his tariffs. But a slew of Republican lawmakers are shooting down the idea. Speaker Johnson said Tuesday that doing so would require an act of Congress, contradicting a top White House official who said the administration might move forward with the plan unilaterally.

8. Mace vs. Mills. Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) offered a motion yesterday to censure Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL) over alleged ethics violations, a rare Republican-on-Republican condemnation. The House ultimately voter to refer the matter to the Ethics Committee but it sparked a considerable amount of backbiting between the two GOP members: per the Wall Street Journal’s Olivia Beavers, Mace appeared to mouth “you’re a piece of shit” to Mills. “Some ‘you ares’ being thrown back and forth between the two,” Beavers added. Welcome to Congress.

9. Congressional stock trading. Certain rank-and-file lawmakers have been agitating all year (and even longer) for Speaker Johnson to hold a vote on a bipartisan bill to ban members of Congress from trading stocks. The House Administration Committee held a hearing on the issue yesterday — frustrating the bill’s sponsors, who had been hoping the panel would hold a vote on the measure. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) threatened to launch a discharge petition for the bill if the Administration Committee didn’t announce a vote by the end of yesterday — which they didn’t. “Everyone is entitled to follow the House rules as they see fit,” the committee’s chairman, Bryan Steil (R-WI), told me yesterday after the hearing when asked about Luna’s threat. If a potential discharge petition proves successful, it would be the fourth this year, the most since the 75th Congress, which met from 1937 to 1939.

10. Wicker vs. Colby. Finally, we return to the ongoing dispute between the GOP’s interventionist and isolationist wings. Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Roger Wicker (R-MS) and other members of his committee have been clashing with the Trump Defense Department for months, especially Pentagon policy chief Elbridge Colby, who has repeatedly sought to pause Ukraine aid. This week, Wicker canceled a committee vote on nominees for Colby’s office, which Politico described as a “hard flex from traditional Republicans” against the more isolationist Trump administration.

This is not all: there will be more fights coming. The Trump administration is reportedly planning an executive order attempting to block states from enacting AI regulations, a proposal Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) and other GOP lawmakers harshly condemned this summer. Trump is also reportedly preparing a 28-point Russia/Ukraine peace plan, which will likely reopen rifts between the party’s Russia hawks and doves. (Rep. Don Bacon, a moderate Republican from Nebraska, has already come out against it.)

Again, none of this is too abnormal! It’s easy to stay united in the minority, when all you have to do is so “no” to things. It’s harder to all agree on saying “yes” to something. Democrats found this during the Biden era, as did Republicans during the first Trump term.

But in light of the striking unity the GOP had cobbled together for most of the year thus far, the splits are notable. There is also at least one sign the frustrations are boiling down not just to Republican lawmakers, but to voters: the new Fox poll pegged Trump’s approval rating among Republicans at 86%, which is obviously high — but it’s also the lowest it’s been all year, a six-point slide among his own party faithful since the spring.