Donald Trump entered his second term with an approval rating above 50 percent. Eighteen months later, his 927-page financial disclosure landed at the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, revealing $2.2 billion in personal income for 2025, while polls showed a majority of Americans had concluded he was using the presidency to enrich himself. Those two facts are colliding in ways that are now having GOP strategists run the numbers on House seat losses.
Trump earned more than $1.4 billion from his cryptocurrency ventures in 2025, according to the personal financial disclosure released by the Office of Government Ethics. In response to questions about his earnings, Trump told reporters, “You know why I’m profiting, because the stock market’s going up, everybody’s profiting.” His World Liberty Financial crypto token earnings alone reached over $550 million, nine times what he earned from the same venture in 2024, when the figure stood at $57 million.
One of the largest bursts of stock activity detailed in the disclosure occurred on August 18, 2025, when Trump’s accounts made three successive purchases of Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia, each trade valued at between $5 million and $25 million, according to CNBC. Overall, investment accounts tied to Trump made more than 21,000 securities trades in 2025, with holdings spread across roughly 1,600 companies. For comparison, Joe Biden reported only 13 stock trades during his entire presidency. The timing of some trades has drawn particular scrutiny. On the same day the White House unveiled its AI Action Plan on July 23, 2025, Trump’s accounts purchased between $1 and $5 million each in six companies, namely Amazon, Apple, Broadcom, Meta, Microsoft, and Nvidia, whose work with AI was directly affected by that policy.
The Corruption Question Is Taking Hold
Growing public belief that the presidency is being monetized has hardened across the political spectrum. Brookings Institution research found that 54% of Americans believe the president is using his office for personal gain. In a May 2026 Economist/YouGov poll, twice as many Americans said Trump does not pay the amount of federal income taxes he owes as said he does, at 49% versus 25%.
Trump’s increasingly close ties to the cryptocurrency industry have drawn criticism for their potential for corruption. Senator Elizabeth Warren, alongside four other Democratic senators, warned U.S. financial regulators that they might soon confront what they called an “extraordinary conflict of interest”: overseeing a cryptocurrency entity controlled by the sitting president and his family. The conflict-of-interest argument has particular traction with World Liberty Financial, the crypto company co-founded with his sons Eric Trump and Donald Trump Jr. Investors, including members of the UAE’s royal family, put money into World Liberty Financial, prompting critics to argue the arrangement “raises questions about what more the UAE may receive, or may have already received, at the expense of U.S. interests.
The White House has pushed back firmly. A White House spokesperson said: “Neither the President nor his family has ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest. President Trump proudly made the United States the crypto capital of the world through executive actions.” Presidents and vice presidents are required by law to declare income and assets but are not subject to the ethics laws that prohibit conflicts of interest among most executive branch employees.
That legal distinction has done little to move public opinion. A June Reuters/Ipsos poll found that Americans continue to identify the economy as the nation’s most pressing concern, followed by threats to democratic values and corruption.
The Economy Is the Deepest Wound
A record 63% of Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling the economy, according to the Economist/YouGov July 2026 poll, a net approval of -34 and his lowest in either term. That’s far worse than his standing on the economy at the same point in his first term, when more Americans approved than disapproved of his economic management, at +8.
A CNN poll conducted by SSRS found that 77% of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, say Trump’s policies have increased the cost of living in their own community, and roughly two-thirds say his policies have worsened economic conditions overall. Majorities of Americans say the prices of cars and housing have risen significantly over the past year, while 76% say gas prices have gone up a lot.
A poll conducted in January 2026 found that only 21% of respondents thought the president was focusing on the right priorities, compared to 47% who thought his priorities were wrong. That gap has since widened. The trust-in-economy metric, which Republicans held for more than a decade, has now flipped. For the first time since 2010, Democrats are more trusted than Republicans to handle the economy. In the latest CNN polling, Democrats are more trusted than the GOP on central economic issues including the cost of living, helping the middle class, and inflation.
Who’s Walking Away
The approval decline isn’t simply a deepening of partisan opposition. The voters who moved toward Trump in 2024 are now among those moving away. According to the Brookings Institution analysis, as of mid-2026, only 15% of independents, 19% of young adults, and 29% of Hispanics say they will vote for Republican candidates in the 2026 midterms.
Among young voters, Trump’s net approval has fallen sharply in the Economist/YouGov series. The Yale Youth Poll Spring 2026 found that 68% of voters aged 18 to 22 and 72% of those aged 23 to 29 express disapproval of Trump’s job performance. The millennial picture is similarly bleak. Trump’s approval among millennials has hit its lowest level recorded in the Economist/YouGov polling series, with just 26% approval and 65% disapproval.
Even within his own party, the ground has shifted. Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, 68% approve of the way Trump is handling his job, down from 73% in January 2026. The share who say he “keeps his promises” has dropped 6 percentage points from last year and 14 percentage points from November 2024. One recent Focaldata survey put Trump’s net approval rating at an all-time low of -23, “with the share of Americans disapproving of his performance rising for the fourth consecutive month.”
What November Is Starting to Look Like
For Senate and House Republicans, these numbers carry concrete electoral implications. In 2024, Republican House candidates won 49.8% of votes cast versus 47.2% for Democrats, a 2.6-point edge. Today, Democrats hold a 5.3-point advantage on the generic ballot, a swing of nearly 8 points, which matters because 21 House Republicans won their seats in 2024 with margins of less than 8 points, according to the Brookings Institution analysis.
In the first four months of 2026, midterm prospects for Republicans darkened further, with Democrats developing serious chances of flipping Republican-held seats in North Carolina, Maine, Alaska, and Ohio, while Iowa and Texas are no longer considered safe Republican bets.
Special elections have provided an early read on the direction of travel. Off-year elections in New Jersey and Virginia favored Democrats, and special elections in 2025 and 2026 saw Democrats either win outright or substantially improve their performance. CNN reported that Trump’s slipping approval rating among his 2024 voters threatens meaningful components of the coalition that elected him, with knock-on effects for Republican turnout in November.
The Numbers Behind the Moment
History offers a consistent pattern: presidential approval below 40% at this stage of the cycle, combined with a generic ballot lead exceeding 5 points for the opposition party, has preceded significant wave elections in 1974, 1994, and 2018. Both conditions are currently in place heading into November 2026.
What makes this cycle different from those earlier wave elections is the combination of factors arriving simultaneously. The financial disclosure data has given the corruption argument the specificity it typically lacks. Grocery prices, gas costs, and economic anxiety are dominating household conversations at the same time. And the voters driving the shift, young adults, Hispanics, and independents, are precisely the groups Trump flipped in 2024. Winning them back in a single cycle would require a marked economic turnaround or a significant reframing of the corruption issue. Neither is currently in view. The president’s attempt to attribute current economic conditions to his predecessor has not worked, with voters holding Trump rather than Biden responsible by a margin of more than two to one. Whether that judgment holds through Election Day is now the central question of the 2026 cycle.
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AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.
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