Politics
Trump’s approval ratings just hit a new low. A Latino voter shift could reshape the midterms
WASHINGTON — With the Iran war in its fifth week, support for President Trump is at its lowest point ever, with a growing body of recent polling showing him losing ground with key voting blocs that helped power his 2024 victory.
While public dissatisfaction is evident among many groups surveyed, the decline in support for the president has been most pronounced among Latino voters.
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released March 24 found 36% of voters approve of the president’s job performance, the lowest it has been during his second term. The poll found 62% disapproved.
Other polls, such as the AP-NORC poll, placed the figure at 38%.
In all, the president is underwater on almost every single public policy issue. With the exception of crime, which sits around 47% approval, he has recorded no gains in any polled category, according to experts.
On immigration, the president’s marquee issue, approval fell from roughly 45% in late 2025 to 39% in February, according to Reuters.
About 1 in 4 respondents approved of Trump’s handling of the economy, Reuters found, as domestic gas prices surged by more than $1 per gallon after fighting commenced last month. The share of Republicans who disapprove of his handling of cost-of-living issues rose 7 points in one week to 34%.
The shift comes amid growing economic unease and amplified backlash over the war in Iran. About 1 in 3 Americans approve of the military operation, according to a Reuters survey.
And a growing divide among prominent conservatives has emerged over the U.S. involvement in the Middle East.
The clashes have played out in public and are exposing tensions within the Republican Party, with conservative commentators such as Megyn Kelly openly questioning whether the war is in America’s best interest.
“This is not a foreign policy that makes sense and it is not what Trump ran on. It is, in many ways, a betrayal of his campaign promises, what he sold himself as and of his MAGA base,” Kelly said earlier this month.
Other conservative pundits, including Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, are also opposed.
But the real damage is showing up in the one place Trump can’t afford to lose: his base.
Trump entered his second term buoyed by historic gains with Latino voters. Exit polls indicated he improved his standing with them by more than 20 percentage points in 2024 compared with his 2016 victory, fueling widespread narratives that the demographic was undergoing a durable shift toward Republicans. In all, 48% of Latinos gave him their support in the last election.
Since then, his approval among Latino voters has plummeted to 22%, according to a March 2026 analysis by the Economist.
In a bipartisan poll by UnidosUS released in November, 14% of Latino voters said their lives were better after Trump took office, while 39% said they had gotten worse.
The president’s rapport with Latinos reflects a deep dissatisfaction with economic conditions, according to Mike Madrid, a veteran California Republican political consultant and expert on Latino voting trends.
“Overwhelmingly, this is a function of the economy and affordability,” he said. “Latino voters moved away from Biden-Harris for the exact same reasons that they’re moving away from Donald Trump right now.”
Research and polling suggests Latino voters prioritize cost-of-living issues — such as housing, wages and inflation — over immigration, a topic often emphasized in national messaging.
“It’s not even close,” Madrid said. “Immigration is not even a top 5 issue for Latino voters.”
Madrid suggested the demographic rallying is less a “reversion” and more a reflection of a rapidly changing electorate.
“Latinos have emerged as the only true swing vote in America,” he said. “And they’re rejecting whichever party is in power.”
These volatile, double-digit voting shifts directly contrast more stable voting patterns among other major demographic groups, including the Black and white electorates, where shifts from cycle to cycle tend to be just a few points.
The reason: dramatic turnout fluctuations. Who decides to show out or stay home on election day tends to change by the year. It’s compounded by the fact that there are far more first-time Latino voters than in any other category.
Polling this month suggests Trump is also losing ground among young voters, another group that contributed to his 2024 gains.
More than half of men under the age of 30 supported Trump in that election, helping him turn several swing states.
In just a year, that demographic has cratered by 20 points.
“Trump won in 2024 because of men. They are abandoning him right now,” CNN senior data analyst Harry Enten said Tuesday.
The reversals could have massive implications for the November midterm elections, particularly in competitive congressional districts where small swings could determine control of the House.
Republicans have warned that if they lose hold of their narrow congressional majority, Trump is likely to face a third impeachment.
UCLA political scientist Matt Barreto said movement away from Republicans is already visible in real-world election outcomes, not just polling.
“We’ve already seen in the Virginia and New Jersey legislative and gubernatorial elections really large shifts in the Latino vote, 25 points back to the Democratic Party,” Barreto said. He added that similar patterns have emerged in places such as Miami and Texas, where Democratic candidates have outperformed expectations with strong Latino support.
Latino Democrats who sat out the 2024 election are returning to the electorate, while some Latino Republicans are disengaging, he said.
That dynamic could prove decisive in November. There are more than 40 congressional districts where the number of registered Latino voters exceeds the margin of victory in 2024, Barreto said. Many of them are closely divided between the parties.
“At the district level, the Latino vote is going to make a huge impact,” he said.
Buckingham Palace said on Sunday that it was assessing plans for this week’s scheduled U.S. visit by King Charles III and Queen Camilla in light of the shooting on Saturday at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington, D.C.
The palace said in a statement that discussions would take place “throughout the day” to consider “to what degree the events of Saturday evening may or may not impact on the operational planning for the visit.” It expressed the king’s relief that no guests were hurt.
It said that the king had been “kept fully informed of developments” and that he was “greatly relieved” that Mr. Trump, Melania Trump and all other guests were unharmed.
There was no immediate indication that plans for the king’s state visit, which was scheduled to begin Monday, would change. The British royals have been preparing for a four-day visit hosted by President Trump, including an address to Congress and a banquet at the White House. The visit was arranged to celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence, and the royals are set to stop in New York and Washington, D.C.
Planning for the visit began long before the United States and Israel attacked Iran in late February, setting off a war that has put considerable strain on the U.S.- British relationship.
Mr. Trump has disparaged Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his government over Britain’s reluctance to join the offensive. Still, Mr. Starmer joined a chorus of world leaders to express solidarity with Mr. Trump on Sunday. The British government said that Mr. Starmer had spoken with President Trump by phone on Sunday.
Some have hoped that the royals’ visit could smooth over geopolitical tensions. Mr. Trump likes pomp and circumstance. And he has praised the king, who hosted the president for a state visit to Britain last September.
“I look forward to spending time with the King, whom I greatly respect,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media last month. “It will be TERRIFIC!”
Esther Bintliff contributed reporting.
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President Donald Trump infamously acknowledges he is choosing the world’s most “dangerous profession,” but surviving a third unprecedented assassination attempt — including one where he was shot in the ear — is only hardening his resolve.
“I’ve studied assassinations, and I must tell you, the most impactful people, the people that do the most” are the targets, Trump said in a Saturday night White House press briefing after an alleged would-be assassin was stopped by the U.S. Secret Service at the Washington Hilton, the notorious site of former President Ronald Reagan’s shooting in 1981.
“You take a look at the people, Abraham Lincoln, I mean, you go through the people that have gone through this where they got them, but the people that do the most, the people that make the biggest impact, they’re the ones that they go after.
“They don’t go after the ones that don’t do much because they like it that way.”
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President Donald Trump gestures as he speaks in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House after an unspecified threat at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in Washington, Saturday, April 25, 2026. (Jose Luis Magana/AP)
In Trump’s case, three thwarted assassinations are part of his presidential lore, facing a string of shootings, plots and major security breaches unlike anything in history.
Trump cautiously admitted, “I hate to say I’m honored by that,” but noted that “the big names” and the big movers are the targets.
Saturday night’s chaos at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner in Washington added a new entry to a list already defined by gunfire in Butler, Pa. (July 13, 2024), an armed suspect at his Florida golf club (Sept. 15, 2024) and the Secret Service’s discovery of a sniper’s nest in eyeshot of where Air Force One lands at Palm Beach International in Florida.
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Trump hailed the unity at the WHCA dinner in a room of some of his fiercest critics in the media, urging Americans to unify in divided political times.
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“In light of this evening’s events, I asked that all Americans recommit with their hearts and resolving our differences peacefully,” Trump said. “We have to resolve our differences.”
“I will say you had Republicans, Democrats, Independents, conservatives, liberals and progressives — those words are interchangeable, perhaps, but maybe they’re not — but yet everybody in that room, big crowd, record-setting crowd. There was a record-setting group of people, and there was a tremendous amount of love and coming together,” Trump continued.
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“I watched, and I was very, very impressed by that.“
Law enforcement officials block off a street at an address connected to Cole Tomas Allen, the shooting suspect at the White House Correspondents Dinner, in Torrance, Calif., on April 25, 2026. (Ethan Swope/AP)
Trump and first lady Melania Trump were rushed from the Washington Hilton after shots were fired outside the ballroom, where the president had been scheduled to speak.
Authorities said one officer was shot but protected by a ballistic vest, and the suspect, Cole Tomas Allen of California, was taken into custody before breaching the room.
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The three men at the center of the most serious known threats are now Thomas Matthew Crooks (Butler suspect, deceased), Ryan Wesley Routh (Palm Beach suspect, sentenced to life) and now Allen (arrested and charged Saturday night).
Crooks, 20, opened fire at the July 13, 2024, campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania. The FBI identified Crooks as the shooter after he hit Trump in the right ear and killed rallygoer Corey Comperatore before being shot dead by a Secret Service countersniper.
Routh, 59, received a life sentence for his attempt at Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach in September 2024. Prosecutors said Secret Service agents spotted him with a rifle near the course while Trump was playing, prompting an agent to open fire before Routh could get a shot off.
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Allen, identified in Saturday night’s Washington incident, is the newest name on that list. Authorities have announced firearms and assault-related charges.
Law enforcement at a Saturday night news conference said Allen was armed with multiple weapons and allegedly fired during a rush at a security perimeter near the dinner, striking a Secret Service agent in his bulletproof vest before being “tackled” to the ground without taking a bullet from the Secret Service.
“One officer was shot, but saved by the fact that he was wearing an obviously a very good bulletproof vest,” Trump told reporters, many still in their tuxedos, having left the canceled WHCA dinner, too. “He was shot from very close distance with a very powerful gun, and the vest did the job. I just spoke to the officer and he’s doing great. He’s great shape. He’s very high spirits, and we told him we love him and respect him.”
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Taken together, the three cases underscore how Trump’s security profile has changed from unusually fraught to historically extraordinary. One attempt drew blood on a campaign stage, another ended in a life sentence after a rifle ambush at a golf course, and the latest forced a presidential evacuation from one of Washington’s highest-profile public events.
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Trump signaled Saturday night that he does not plan to retreat from public appearances despite the repeated threats.
“The response time was really incredible, and we’re going to reschedule,” Trump said. “We’re going to do it again.”
“We’re not going to let anybody take over our society,” he added. “We’re not going to cancel things out because we can’t do that. We wanted to stay tonight.”
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Other thwarted plots and security scares
Beyond the three highest-profile cases, Trump has faced a broader pattern of violent threats and close calls dating back to his first campaign.
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In June 2016, Michael Steven Sandford, a British national, allegedly tried to grab a police officer’s gun at a Trump rally in Las Vegas and later told investigators he intended to kill Trump, according to court records and contemporaneous reporting.
In March 2016, Thomas Dimassimo rushed onto the stage at a Dayton, Ohio, rally before Secret Service agents tackled him.
And in November 2016, Trump was briefly rushed offstage in Reno, Nevada, after someone in the crowd shouted “gun,” though authorities later said the man detained was unarmed.
President Ronald Reagan waves to onlookers moments before an assassination attempt by John Hinckley Jr. on March 30, 1981, outside the Washington Hilton in Washington, D.C. (The White House/Getty Images)
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Public reporting has also documented later threats not carried out at Trump’s immediate location, including a 2020 ricin letter case; a 2024 murder-for-hire plot tied to Iran; a 2017 North Dakota incident in which a man stole a forklift and aimed it toward the presidential motorcade; and a February 2026 confrontation at Mar-a-Lago in which Secret Service fatally shot a 21-year-old who was armed with a shotgun and gas canister while Trump was in Washington.
WASHINGTON — When families flocked to Yosemite National Park during their recent spring breaks, some met two-hour waits at the entrance gates. At a lakeside spot in the North Cascades in Washington state, there hasn’t been enough staff to open the visitors center. And in Death Valley, water was shut off at two campgrounds.
National parks staff and advocates fear that such issues could only worsen this summer, as the park system faces the busy season with a dramatically reduced staff. At Yosemite, concerns are compounded by the National Park Service’s recent elimination of the park’s timed-entry reservation system, which led to the long spring-break lines.
“We’re definitely really nervous and anxious about the upcoming season, especially with the staff shortage we already have,” said a National Federation of Federal Employees union member at Yosemite who requested anonymity to speak candidly.
The National Park Service has lost nearly a quarter of its staff to buyouts, early retirements and other departures since the Trump administration took office last year, according to an estimate by the National Parks Conservation Assn. This month, the administration proposed cutting nearly 3,000 more positions in its 2027 budget. It also offered a recent new round of buyouts.
The push to cut the park system even further — ahead not only of peak season but of America’s 250th birthday, which the Trump administration has promoted in relation to national parks — has underscored ongoing questions about how smoothly parks can operate as warm weather and summer vacations draw tourists.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum defended the budget proposal on Capitol Hill last week, telling senators that the visitor experience to parks can be improved even while spending and staff reductions are made.
He said the agency plans to hire 5,500 seasonal workers and asked Congress to approve funding for those employees to work for nine-month stints rather than six months.
“All of that’s going to help us get this thing in shape, even with an overall reduction,” Burgum said Wednesday.
He was met with skepticism by Democrats, who confronted him over the spending proposal.
“That is just a recipe for disaster,” Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) told Burgum.
Congress will have the final say on the proposed cuts, but in the meantime, the reductions that have already occurred presented challenges last season and appear likely to do so again, said Cheryl Schreier, a retired superintendent of Mount Rushmore National Memorial and chair of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks.
Whether the parks will get enough qualified candidates to hire the number of seasonal workers needed is also “a really big concern,” she said. “It’s really important to have all of those individuals to be able to operate a park in a good fashion.”
Campers prepare food in Yosemite Valley last December. 9, 2025 in Yosemite, CA.
(Eric Thayer/Los Angeles Times)
The lower staffing has prompted worry about parks’ capacity for emergency response, protection of the natural landscape and custodial maintenance. Fewer rangers could mean, for instance, fewer people to reach dehydrated, stranded or lost hikers, said Chance Wilcox, California desert director for the National Parks Conservation Assn.
A park service spokesperson said Friday that staffing decisions are made based on local conditions at each park and that the agency is “focused on ensuring parks remain open, accessible, and safe for visitors.”
About 323 million people visit America’s national parks annually, according to the Interior Department. While the parks can expect heavy traffic, a drop in international tourism and the rise in gas prices has injected additional uncertainty into the tourism industry this year.
The number of Canadians visiting the United States has dropped since Trump took office, according to the Canadian government — with the number of Canadians making car trips to the United States this March declining by 35% compared with March 2024.
The Interior Department also instituted a new $100-per-person fee for non-Americans entering 11 of the most popular parks, a move to raise money for the parks but an extra squeeze for Canadians coming across the border and other international visitors.
At the Senate and House hearings on the Interior budget, Burgum presented a vision of the national parks system as one where most employees should be working at a park and interacting with visitors, and said he was more focused on filling those roles than jobs in regional offices.
“Our goal is to have more people actually working in the parks,” he told senators.
An Interior Department spokesperson said the agency was “advancing high-priority improvements” across the system.
“Secretary Burgum has been clear that resources should be prioritized toward visitor-facing services, public safety, maintenance, and projects that improve the experience for the American people,” an Interior Department spokesperson said in a statement Friday.
Critics say that strategy displays a misunderstanding of how the 109-year-old agency functions. Employees who work on contracts, human resources, IT, communications and other organizational and administrative jobs are essential to keeping the parks running, Wilcox said.
“If everything were visitor- or front-facing, the entire agency would collapse from behind,” said Wilcox, of the National Parks Conservation Assn.
The decision to discontinue the reservation system at Yosemite — as well as at Arches and Glacier national parks — is another part of Interior’s mission to bring more people into the parks. The concept was “designed to expand public access” this summer, the park service said in announcing the policy in February. It kept the timed-entry reservation system in Rocky Mountain National Park for the peak season.
Visitors take pictures while walking through Muir Woods National Monument on July 24, 2025 in Muir Woods National Monument, California.
(Justin Sullivan / Getty Images)
In addition to causing long lines, cramming too many people into the parks at once could lead to environmental damage, particularly if people park cars in natural areas, said Don Neubacher, a retired Yosemite superintendent and member of the Coalition to Protect America’s National Parks.
“It’s going to be mass chaos,” he said.
On a Saturday at the end of March, Jon Christenson of Coarsegold, Calif., drove to the park with his 38-year-old son. They were surprised to encounter a two-hour wait to get into the park, plus at least a half-hour hunt for parking after they made it through the gates, he said.
“It was almost like Disneyland. It was really uncomfortable from the standpoint of just so many people,” said Christenson, 82. “It’s kind of troubling to see that they’ve opened up the floodgates and now it’s kind of ruining the experience for everybody.”
Rangers there are doing multiple jobs, and last summer they helped clean bathrooms in the absence of custodial staff, the Yosemite union member said. Now they, too, are concerned about the potential for gridlock.
The worker asked summer visitors to bring patience: “The folks at the National Park Service … they will be grateful for any compassion and empathy.”
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