Backlash over the Trump administration’s fumbling of the Epstein investigation could be a factor behind a slew of polling showing the president’s approval rating wavering.
In a Morning Consult poll released Monday, 47 percent of voters said that they approved of Donald Trump’s performance as president. It was a slight gain of two percentage points from the prior week’s tracking survey results, but it belies a massive shift over the past month. Over the course of mid-June to mid-July, Morning Consult’s polling tracked a six-point drop in Trump’s approval rating, from 50 percent to 44 percent, alongside a surge in disapproval from 44 percent to 50 percent.
Over that time period, the administration oversaw passage of the GOP’s budget reconciliation package, the “big beautiful bill,” through Congress. The White House also ordered strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities, leading many to believe at the time that the U.S. was on the brink of being drawn directly into a Middle Eastern conflict once again.
The chilling spectacle of massive ICE raids across the country has also caused Trump’s issue-based approval rating on immigration to plunge in multiple recent surveys.
His approval rating actually ticked up slightly in the days after the FBI and Justice Department declared in a joint statement that there was no evidence to support the existence of a “client list” in the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted pedophile who died by suicide in 2019 while awaiting prosecution for sex trafficking charges. That finding has become a major problem for the president, given that members of his own team fueled speculation about the issue in media appearances and in public statements for years.
Trump’s performance rating was also dipping in a second survey from the Scott Rasmussen-founded Napolitan News Service, which saw it drop by 1 percentage point between June 30 and July 10.
But those polls may not have registered the extent of the fury that has engulfed MAGAworld over the sudden stonewalling of further information about the investigation from Trump and his team, given that it tracked responses from July 4-10.
That backlash has largely erupted among Trump’s youngest and most online supporters as outrage has rippled across the MAGA podcasting spheres and begun leaking into the sort-of-adjacent “manosphere” podcasting arena as well.
Democrats, too, began picking up the issue late last week as the party catches on to the anger over broken promises made by the likes of Vice President JD Vance and others to make public more information about the case — including, most importantly, the list of supposed clients. Few in MAGAworld beyond some of Trump’s most opportunistic loyalists have accepted the explanation that a client list, whether created by Epstein himself or by investigators, exists in some form. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s remark that the file was “on her desk” earlier this year, and Elon Musk’s assertion that Trump is on the supposed list, are not helping matters for the White House.
Trump, on Saturday, issued his own bizarrely worded plea to his followers to drop the issue, which was rejected in a rare ratio-ing committed by his Truth Social fans.
“What’s going on with my ‘boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals?’” Trump wrote. “They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB!”
“We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and ‘selfish people’ are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein,” added Trump.
In other polling, the president remains even further underwater.
A Yahoo/YouGov poll released in early July found the president 16 points in the negative on the issue of his overall job performance, fueled in part by an 8-point deficit on the issue of immigration and border control.
No major surveys have directly polled the handling of the Epstein case by Trump and his team specifically. However, a YouGov poll (for which methodology was not immediately available) released on July 9 found that a wide majority of American adults do not believe the extent of Epstein’s crimes will ever be known or investigated.
