On April 30, 2026, pollster G. Elliott Morris posted a chart on X from his Strength in Numbers/Verasight data, tracking Trump's approval across issue areas including deportations, immigration, trade, healthcare, civil rights, democracy, and inflation/cost of living. “Trump literally broke the scale of this graph on my data portal,” Morris wrote. According to The Daily Beast, the inflation/cost-of-living line had dropped below every other category and stood at negative 40.3 points as of April 30, Trump's lowest figure on the issue in his second term.
Morris's own April survey, conducted April 10-14, put the number even lower: net approval on prices and inflation of -46, “the worst rating on any single issue in the history of our poll,” down every month of 2026 from -31 in January. An AP-NORC poll released April 21 found similar weakness, with only about one-quarter of U.S. adults approving of Trump's handling of the cost of living and his economic approval falling to 30% from 38% in March.
The Daily Beast reported that the decline on cost of living began on March 13, two weeks after the war with Iran began on February 28, as gas prices rose to a national average of $4.30 a gallon on April 30, according to AAA. One voter interviewed by the Associated Press, Kathryn Bright, a 60-year-old retired Air Force captain who voted for Trump, said she was drawn to his vows to support veterans, avoid foreign wars and lower costs. “I feel disgusted with myself, I feel betrayed, like he was a wolf in sheep's clothing,” she said. White House spokesman Davis Ingle told the Daily Beast that the “ultimate poll was November 5th 2024.”
Correction (October 2, 2026): The entry said the cost-of-living decline began on March 13, “the day after” the Iran war began; the war began February 28, about two weeks earlier. It presented -40.3 as the result of Morris's April survey; that figure is the chart value reported by The Daily Beast, while the survey itself found -46. Claims that Brent crude topped $125 a barrel, that -40.3 ranks among the lowest issue scores any modern pollster has recorded, and a list of other same-week controversies were removed because the cited sources do not support them.