The deeper into Trump’s Presidency he gets, the more that Americans despise him. At least 28% of Americans loathe Donald Trump.

16 September 2026, by Eric Zuesse. (All of my recent articles can be seen here.)

On September 15th, the Economist YouGov poll headlined “How unpopular is Donald Trump? The president’s net approval rating is -25, down 0.1 points since last week. 35% approve, 60% disapprove, 5% not sure”. It reported that: “Donald Trump’s net approval rating continues to languish at -25, according to The Economist’s tracker of YouGov polling. The coalition of voters who carried Mr Trump to victory in 2024 is falling apart. …”

The topics on which his approval-deficit is even bigger, starting with the worst of all, are: Inflation, Government spending, Tariffs, The Economy, Iran, Foreign policy, Race relations, and Health care.

The same day, Axios summarized the poll, headlining “Trump considered dangerous, corrupt by majority in new poll”, and reporting:

A slight majority of registered voters describe President Trump as corrupt and dangerous. …

By the numbers: “Corrupt” (53%) and “dangerous” (51%) led the list of descriptors voters applied to Trump in the Sept. 11-14 The Economist-YouGov poll of 1,461 U.S. registered voters. Those words were followed by “out-of-touch” (47%), “cruel” (46%) and “bold” (45%).

On 26 February 2015, when Trump was five weeks into his second term and his net-approval was +4%, I headlined “The Need to Confront the Evilness in Evil Leaders” and reported that,

On February 14th, the AP headlined “Where US adults think the government is spending too much, according to AP-NORC polling”, and listed in rank-order according to the opposite (“spending too little”) the following 8 Government functions: 1. Social Security; 2. Medicare; 3. Education; 4. Assistance to the poor; 5. Medicaid; 6. Border security; 7. Federal law enforcement; 8. The Military. That’s right: the American public (and by an overwhelming margin) are THE LEAST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on the military, and the MOST SUPPORTIVE of spending more money on Social Security, Medicare, Education, Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid (the five functions the Republican Party has always been the most vocal to call “waste, fraud, and abuse” and try to cut). Meanwhile, The Military, which actually receives 53% (and in the latest year far more than that) of the money that the Congress allocates each year and gets signed into law by the President, keeps getting, each year, over 50% of the annually appropriated federal funds. …

On February 25th, HufPo headlined “House Adopts Republican Budget That Calls For Medicaid Cuts: Lobbying by President Donald Trump himself helped sway Republican holdouts.”, and reported that “The budget resolution [just passed in the House] calls for $4.5 trillion in tax cuts and $1.5 trillion in spending cuts,” and that “Democrats all voted against the budget, denouncing its 11% reduction in Medicaid spending over 10 years and its 20% cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.” So: Trump’s enormous tax-cuts for billionaires would be partially paid for by cutting Medicaid to the nation’s poor. However, the Republican argument (as is always the case regarding their efforts to punish the poor) is that “We can eliminate all these fraudulent payments and achieve a lot of savings.” The “fraudulent payments” hadn’t been documented but estimated by Elon Musk’s DOGE, Musk being, of course, not only the wealthiest of America’s billionaires but also by far the biggest donor ($279 million) to Trump’s re-election campaign (as well as a large and rapidly growing seller or “contractor” of Starlink and other weapons and services to the only U.S. federal Department that has never yet been audited, the ‘Defense’ Department). The article said that, “President Donald Trump personally lobbied some of the holdouts with phone calls on Tuesday, including Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.), who withheld his vote until it was already clear the House would adopt the measure without him.” So: Trump’s DOGE cuts funding of healthcare for the nation’s poor, while his lobbying gets the thing to pass in the House though all Democrats voted against it.

So: whereas the American public wanted increases in federal spending, and decreases in federal spending, to be ranked as (INCREASE) 1. Social Security; 2. Medicare; 3. Education; 4. Assistance to the poor; 5. Medicaid; 6. Border security; 7. Federal law enforcement; and (DECREASE) 8. The Military, Trump and his Republican Congress are passing into law cuts in numbers 4 and 5 (Assistance to the poor, and Medicaid) the two priorities that are specifically for the poor; and they will presumably be increasing the most: 8. The Military; 7. Federal law enforcement (mainly against poor people); and 6. Border security (which includes Trump’s demand to eliminate ALL refugee-admissions into the U.S.). These are extraordinarily ‘libertarian’ (or “neoliberal”) policies, but they definitely are NOT the priorities of the American public. To THEM, this is a hostile country.

On 15 September 2026, the AP headlined “Trump administration plans to send powerful bombs to Israel in $2.8 billion weapons sale” and reported that,

The Trump administration is planning to deliver powerful 2,000-pound bombs to Israel as part of an upcoming arms deal, weapons that prompted such concerns about the possibility of mass casualties in Gaza that the Biden administration paused their delivery two years ago.

The $2.8 billion package includes 40,000 of the bombs, made up of 20,000 Mk84s and 20,000 BLU-117s, according to two U.S. officials and a person familiar with the plan who spoke Tuesday on condition of anonymity to discuss the package, which is not yet final.

Congress has been informally notified about the pending deal, most of which is to be paid for with foreign military financing — in which U.S. taxpayer dollars are given to Israel to turn around and buy the weapons from the United States. …

That last clause means that “most” of these 40,000 bombs (if they ever reach Israel) will not be “sold” to Israel but donated to Israel by America’s taxpayers (then to be used to eliminate people and buildings in Gaza and in southern Lebanon); so, the headline was false, and “donation” would have been truer. (And far more people see a headline than read the news report.) This even more makes U.S. taxpayers complicit in Israel’s ethnic cleansing and genocide operations. If all of these 2,000-pound bombs — which are fragmentation-type and thus designed to maximize the number of corpses; and the BLU-117s are further designed to include some delayed detonations so as to eliminate medical personnel who try to salvage and save victims — are used, then would anyone there survive? This is the sort of thing I was referring to when I headlined “The Need to Confront the Evilness in Evil Leaders”.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.