STEPHEN: Hi. This is Stephen (ph) from Salt Lake City, Utah, where I’m driving home with a newly adopted 18-month-old puppy to introduce her to my wife…
SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:
Aw. Nice.
STEPHEN: …And surprise the kids.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Oh, boy.
STEPHEN: This podcast was recorded at…
MCCAMMON: 1:07 p.m. Eastern time on Monday, March 3, 2025.
STEPHEN: Things may have changed by the time you hear it, but we’ll still be learning to love this new addition to our family. OK, here’s the show.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA’S “TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)”)
LIASSON: The dogs of NPR. Welcome them.
MCCAMMON: Eighteen months is a great age, too, ’cause you don’t have to usually train them to do everything.
DOMENICO MONTANARO, BYLINE: It’s not like an 8-week-old, you know, or something like that…
MCCAMMON: Right.
MONTANARO: …Which would be a lot of work.
MCCAMMON: A lot of work.
MONTANARO: But I have to say, giving a puppy as a surprise is not usually the best tactic.
LIASSON: (Laughter).
MCCAMMON: I was wondering about that.
LIASSON: They must have been begging for them for one…
MONTANARO: Yeah (laughter).
LIASSON: …For a long time. That’s usually what happens.
MCCAMMON: Hey there. It’s the NPR POLITICS PODCAST. I’m Sarah McCammon. I cover politics.
MONTANARO: I’m Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.
LIASSON: And I’m Mara Liasson, senior national political correspondent.
MCCAMMON: Today on the show, a pulse check from the latest NPR/PBS News/Marist poll. How are Americans reacting and responding to President Trump’s policies so far, and is he making any headway on one of the chief messages of his campaign, which was, of course, addressing high costs and economic concerns? Domenico, we’re going to start with you. Before we get into some of the nitty-gritty here, I just want to take a broader look. What does Trump’s approval rating look like overall?
MONTANARO: What we found here is that Trump has a 45% approval rating, which is lower, by the way, than any past president in the last 80 years since Gallup has been measuring that number. So, you know, clearly, Americans still very divided on Trump. I think one of the big warning signs for him in this poll is independents because only 34% of independents approve of the job that he’s doing.
MCCAMMON: And, Mara, I mean, this is better than where Trump was when he left office in 2021, right?
LIASSON: That’s right, but he’s still underwater. He’s never had a net positive approval rating as president. And he is trying to do things that are very dramatic, big changes. Now, Donald Trump ran as the change candidate. He was elected because people wanted to make big changes. But we don’t know if they wanted to make the changes that he’s making now, like completely upend U.S. foreign policy so that the U.S. is now aligned, at least in the last United Nations vote, with Russia and North Korea and against the Western democracies of Europe. We don’t know if they wanted him to radically downsize the federal government. We just don’t know the answer to that. We know that they wanted him to bring down the price of eggs.
MONTANARO: Fifty-seven percent of people expect prices to go up in the next six months, which was the thing that I think is hard to argue is what got Trump in the White House in the first place. He has said that, you know, he could fix it, he would fix the economy, he would fix prices. But after he was elected, that, you know, the price of apples goes up, it doubles, what can you do? And that’s it.
LIASSON: And when you have 57% of Americans saying they think the price of groceries will increase in the next six months, that affects inflation. Inflation is made up a lot of things. It’s made up of supply chain problems. It’s also made up of expectations. There’s a psychology to this. If a majority of people think that groceries are going to get more expensive, they’re going to change their behavior.
MCCAMMON: Right, and he stressed that during the campaign because he knew what we knew, which is that voters were saying again and again that the economy was, if not their top issue, one of their very top issues. You know, Domenico, when you look at the numbers, though, it’s so interesting that he just got elected largely on this issue. Fifty-seven percent of voters think now that prices are going to go up. How does that break down, though, along party lines?
MONTANARO: Well, Republicans, you know, very much are in line with Trump. Only a small percentage think that prices are going to go up. But the real problem for Trump here is with independents because he’s underwater by 20 points with independents when it comes to his approach on the economy. They think that it’s going to make things worse, and they overwhelmingly think that prices are going to be going up. And, look; that’s – a big part of this is because of all the conversation around tariffs. We know that tariffs are supposed to, he says, go into effect tomorrow. But there’s some question whether or not he’ll actually do that because the stock market has responded negatively to that every single time that he’s threatened those tariffs.
MCCAMMON: So his supporters are still happy and optimistic, but, you know, the rest of the country is worried about prices. I mean, does any of this matter, though? He doesn’t have to run for reelection. The midterms are still a couple of years away.
LIASSON: See, that’s the big question. Trump is such a different president in so many ways, and one of the most, the biggest is that he’s an automatic lame duck. He’s barred by the Constitution from running again, so public opinion is not as much of a guardrail for him as it would be for other presidents. The markets still are. You know, he seems to react to them. If they freak out about tariffs, he pulls back, at least temporarily. And that’s why this whole presidency might be completely different in terms of public opinion. I don’t think he’s thinking about, how can I be as popular as possible so JD Vance becomes the next president?
MONTANARO: (Laughter).
LIASSON: That’s not an issue for him. But he wants to prove a couple things, things that he really believes in, like tariffs are the answer to all economic problems, or dismantling the federal government will make America better.
MONTANARO: Well, I do think, though, that Republicans’ elected leaders are going to be the ones who feel the, you know, either the good things that happen from how people feel about what Trump does or the fallout from what he does politically.
LIASSON: That’s for sure.
MONTANARO: And they have a very narrow majority in the House, and if independents continue to overwhelmingly disapprove, as they are, of what Trump is doing, and Democratic opposition continues to be strong and they show up at the polls, that could spell real trouble for Republicans, especially in the House.
MCCAMMON: OK, before we take a break, we have to talk about Elon Musk and DOGE. I mean, Mara, I think, mentioned a moment ago the just enormous reshaping of the federal government that the Trump administration is trying to do. A lot of that is being led by Elon Musk. How are people feeling about Musk and DOGE?
MONTANARO: Well, Musk and DOGE both only have a 39% favorability rating, so only 39% of people have a positive view of Elon Musk and DOGE. So in some respects, Trump can use Musk as a heat shield. And all the negative things that people feel about the cuts rushing into things – as a majority of people in our poll say that they think that Trump has rushed into these cuts without thinking about the impact – that he can use Musk and maybe cut him off when he needs to. But, really, people don’t think very highly of either DOGE or Musk, and 60% of people think that federal workers are essential to making government work. Only 40% think that the government would be fine without most of them.
LIASSON: And, you know, we’re going to have a real controlled experiment about the political impact of Elon Musk. Like Trump, he is very polarizing, and he may turn out voters for Republicans and against them, just like Trump did. We have an election coming up on April 1. It’s in Wisconsin. It’s for a seat on the state Supreme Court, and it’s very – it’s the first election of the cycle with national implications ’cause the Wisconsin State Supreme Court will probably draw congressional district maps. And Elon Musk is pouring money into that race, and Democrats are going to make him an issue. And it’ll be really interesting to see if his money is a net positive for Republicans, or does he become a lightning rod?
MCCAMMON: OK, it’s time for a quick break. We’ll have more in just a moment.
And welcome back. Some of the biggest news last week was the meeting between President Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The two had that major, very public dispute at the White House over policy related to U.S. support for Ukraine in the war with Russia, which has entered its third year. So, Domenico, the poll was taken, we should say, before that event. But what do the poll numbers tell us about how Americans have been feeling about Ukraine?
MONTANARO: Well, it looks like a little bit of a mixed bag, but we can break these down. Thirty-seven percent said that the U.S. is not giving enough support to Ukraine. Thirty-four percent think the U.S. is giving Ukraine too much support. And another 28% say the U.S. is giving about the right amount of support. But if you combine that 37% who think that the U.S. isn’t giving enough support and those who say that the U.S. is giving the right amount, meaning they likely want to see it continued, that’s two-thirds of people in this poll – 65%. So this idea that the U.S. – that the population wants to cut off support to what has been a traditional ally against a traditional adversary is really Trump sort of swimming upstream with his revolutionary foreign policy here.
MCCAMMON: Right. So most Americans are saying, keep it where it is in terms of the amount of support or even increase it. Mara, what do you make of that breakdown?
LIASSON: Well, what’s interesting to me is that to what extent is the debate about Ukraine becoming a debate about Vladimir Putin and how close Trump is to him, how much he identifies with him. He talked about the two of them going through this horrible experience together, of the investigation that led to Trump’s impeachment, of how much Russia supported him in the 2016 election. So I think if this question gets drawn as kind of pro-Putin, anti-Putin, you’ll see those numbers be even stronger for Ukraine because the American people don’t like Vladimir Putin.
There is a big chunk of the MAGA-right that I – that likes him because he’s a kind of conservative culture warrior, anti-LBGTQ rights, etc. But this is one place where Trump is at – very much at odds with American public opinion, even though foreign policy is not something that usually is a top priority for voters.
MCCAMMON: Does it matter, though? Again, and does it shape Trump’s policy at all?
LIASSON: Doesn’t look like it is so far. That’s for sure.
MONTANARO: I mean, Trump has had, you know, very warm feelings – things he’s said very positively about a lot of strongmen all over the world and autocratic leaders. You know, even going back to his first term, he’s done this pretty consistently. He just really likes somebody who’s got a lot of power. And he sees this foreign policy – the Trump doctrine, sort of – as something that’s more transactional, more, he would say, America First and less about alliances, sort of turning away from America’s friends post-World War II. This idea of what the United States is going to be, Trump is really trying to reshape what that means.
LIASSON: Right. But it’s – he’s not reshaping the U.S. into being a kind of neutral bystander or someone who – or just an isolationist country. He actively – he parrots Kremlin talking points. He calls the president of Ukraine a dictator, but he won’t call Putin a dictator. He won’t say that Russia invaded Ukraine. He says Ukraine started the war. So this has gone farther than just he kind of likes strongmen. He’s actively siding with Russia. And that vote in the United Nations, which was on the third anniversary of the invasion, and it was a motion to condemn Russia – you know, there the United States was refusing to sign on and siding with North Korea, Belarus and Russia.
MONTANARO: Definitely. It’s one of the biggest things that’s happened since he was sworn in.
LIASSON: Yeah.
MCCAMMON: I want to close by asking you both about another item in that poll that caught my eye. It asked whether or not the nation’s system of checks and balances, which is, of course, a fundamental part of the American system of government, whether or not that’s working. And most people, a majority, said they don’t think it is, although, here again, there’s a partisan divide in how they look at that question. So what does it mean for the future of the country if Americans don’t think the system is functioning as it was designed?
MONTANARO: Yeah, and let’s get to the numbers first. Fifty-six percent said that they don’t think that the system of checks and balances is working effectively. That included 8 in 10 Democrats and two-thirds of independents who either disagree or strongly disagree that the country’s system of checks and balances is working well. Seventy-two percent of Republicans, though, strongly agree or agree that the system is functioning effectively because they fully support what Donald Trump is doing, for the most part.
LIASSON: You know, Donald Trump has a very radically different view of how the government should work. The founders set up a system of broadly distributed power, three co-equal branches of government, so that if someone was elected with what they would have called monarchical tendencies or authoritarian tendencies, the system would prevent that person from doing too much damage. Well, Trump and the people around him believe in something called a unitary executive. They want a vastly empowered president.
Congress, right now, has pretty much abdicated its role as a check on the executive branch, and Trump and his supporters are talking about impeaching judges. So he’s going after the judicial branch, which is supposed to be the ultimate check on the executive – the branch that decides whether what the executive is doing is constitutional or not. And this hasn’t come to a head, but it will because a lot of the things that Trump is doing are headed for the Supreme Court.
MONTANARO: But he wants unchecked power, and he’s testing the limits of just how far a president can take things.
MCCAMMON: And we are going to leave it there for today. Just a programming note – we will be in your feed late tomorrow night. That’s because President Trump is addressing a joint session of Congress Tuesday evening. You can hear that live on your NPR station or on the NPR app beginning at 9 p.m. Eastern time. And we will be around after that with analysis and takeaways from the speech.
I’m Sarah McCammon. I cover politics.
MONTANARO: I’m Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent.
LIASSON: And I’m Mara Liasson, senior national political correspondent.
MCCAMMON: And thank you for listening to the NPR POLITICS PODCAST.
(SOUNDBITE OF THE BIGTOP ORCHESTRA’S “TEETER BOARD: FOLIES BERGERE (MARCH AND TWO-STEP)”)
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