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Friday, October 9, 2026
Pew Research asked over 5,000 American adults about President Donald Trump, and only 30% approve. That’s only 1 percentage point higher than his record-low 29% approval rating after the January 6th riots. More concerning for Republicans? Only 67% of Trump voters approve of his presidency, down from 95%, and only 49% of Trump voters ages 19 to 34 approve. But MOST concerning for the GOP is that this precipitous decline comes after Trump has embarked on a nationwide flurry of rallies to support Republican candidates who are increasingly and desperately trying to avoid the very Trump Stink™ that’s at the root of a potentially catastrophic midterm election. Meanwhile, an ICE shooting in NYC brings media focus to the Trump administration’s deeply unpopular immigration policy and signals the end to the bizarrely performative (or performatively bizarre?) bromance between the president and NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Another bromance on the rocks? Fox News and Trump.
01. Trump Sinks Lower the More He Talks as Pew Shows the Slide Reaching His Own Base
[Going Mainstream]. Yesterday the bad polls were state surveys. Today Pew has him at 30 percent approval, and a third of his own 2024 voters disapprove.
A brand new Pew Research poll has Trump at 30 percent approval and 68 percent disapproval in a poll of more than 5,000 adults that was in the field from the last week of September through Oct. 4. That’s the very same stretch of time he spent holding rallies in red states and complaining that Fox News wasn’t carrying them. Pew has only seen Trump's approval rating dip lower than this once, and that was in the days following January 6th, when he was at 29 percent. Only two-thirds of the people who voted for him in 2024 now approve of his job performance as president, which is down a stunning 28 points from the 95 percent when the term started, and 75 percent as recently as July.
That’s a steep decline among his base.
Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei was gobsmacked in telling the Morning Joe table that 30 is a really hard number to get to because so many partisans are locked in no matter what, that the number “is now starting to be contagious” in states that shouldn’t be competitive, and that the Republicans he talks to are “begging Trump to stop doing things that seem to make it harder for them.”
Nobody on Fox & Friends or CNN mentioned the poll in either the 6 or 7 am morning hours, and nobody on Fox News mentioned it Thursday night. CNN's Jeff Zeleny, who was at Trump's Nebraska rally Monday, said one of the quietest applause lines there was Trump blaming Joe Biden. And Joe Scarborough noted that the only other times he had seen a president at 30 were the last days of George W. Bush and the weeks after Jan. 6.
TAKEAWAY: It’s difficult to sum up Trump’s clear and steady decline in the polls day in day out, but it’s not unfair to say that it’s gone from bad to worse to worser. Now we understand why Republican candidates are following the famous Police refrain “Don’t stand so close to me.” But will Trump listen and heed their desire to stay out of the spotlight? Not likely.
02. Trump’s Unpopular ICE Crackdown Returns After ICE Agents Shoot a Man in NYC
[Gaining Traction]. Yesterday both parties were condemning Mamdani’s Oct. 7 statement. Today a two-hour call with Trump over an ICE shooting goes nowhere.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said during a Thursday night press conference that he had been on the phone for two hours with President Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin trying to get the man ICE agents shot in the Marble Hill section of Manhattan/Bronx released from federal custody. “Those negotiations were unsuccessful,” he said before describing how ICE put the man in an unmarked vehicle “and whisked him away.”
Mamdani then blasted the agency as “rotten to its core,” said it “operates with impunity,” and said its agents “have killed far more of our neighbors than they could have ever claimed to have saved.” Trump has not yet commented publicly about the call with Mamdani, and a White House spokesperson has referred questions to DHS. Ainsley Earhardt reported on Fox & Friends that the president replied to the Mayor, “Do you know his criminal record?”
The shooting occurred around four in the afternoon, just after a local school was letting out. Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch said a federal officer in plain clothes walked up with his gun drawn as the 28-year-old driver was pulling into a parking space, the car moved forward and at least one officer fired seven rounds. The driver was hit below the left ear and survived, and the five-year-old in the back seat was not hurt. DHS says the man is a Dominican national with a grand larceny conviction and ties to the Trinitarios gang who the NYPD arrested in 2023 and who “was released into the community a few days later by reckless Democrat sanctuary policies.”
Morning Joe led with it Friday, Joe Scarborough saying “luck is not a policy,” and Fox & Friends went to it right after reporting on the hurricane, with Lawrence Jones calling Mamdani’s statement “ridiculous” and saying “what ICE did was so justified.” CNN got to it in its second hour, where Brynn Gingras reported that the NYPD has not confirmed the gang claim and that Governor Kathy Hochul wants the agents’ body camera footage released.
TAKEAWAY: ICE shootings are now a regular occurrence nationwide, but this happening in NYC, where much of the nation’s news media works and lives, makes it a bigger story, for better or worse. It also brings to the fore yet another policy of Trump’s that took the one issue he was popular on, border and immigration, and has turned into a negative with this draconian approach.
03. Fox News Cools on Trump as Its Ratings Slide With His Polls
[Gaining Traction]. Yesterday Trump griped about Fox News airtime. Today its president shrugs him off and its own reporter fact-checks him on air.
CNN’s Brian Stelter reported Thursday that a Fox News host, speaking anonymously, told him the conventional wisdom inside the network is that “Trump doesn’t rate anymore” and that the decision to skip his rallies is “coming from the top down.” (A person familiar with the network told Stelter there is no top-down order and called the chatter “uninformed speculation.”) Regular readers of this newsletter and my columns probably read that and reacted with two words: “No shit.”
Fox News Media president Jay Wallace told Axios that Martha MacCallum‘s interview with Michigan Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, the one the White House complained about Tuesday, reflected the network’s willingness to air what its core audience may not want to hear, and that “someone didn’t necessarily like that. But that’s what we do.” Axios also reported that Republican operatives had been warning the network’s producers since early August that Jesse Watters‘s praise was helping El-Sayed look moderate.
It’s been a torturous month between the cable news network and the Trump administration. Fox News pushed Maria Bartiromo out over the summer after she sent the White House an internal memo saying the network wasn’t going to chase Trump’s claim that China interfered in the 2020 election. The third-quarter ratings landed and revealed primetime was off roughly 18 percent from last year, and the 25-to-54 demo, which is the audience advertisers actually pay for, was down 25. At the same time, Trump was sliding right along with it, 31 percent in AP-NORC and 30 in Pew this week.
His response has been to pick a fight with the network on Truth Social, first over how much airtime Jessica Tarlov gets, and then the rallies it skips, and this week a MacCallum interview he called “softball.” He also told viewers he was changing the channel, “like I am doing right now!” I’ve been writing about this since August, and nothing this week changes my read. In this fight the network has the leverage, and the people running it know it.
Thursday night Peter Doocy was on Hannity telling the audience “we had to fact check the president here, Sean,” because Trump “was telling us for weeks that he did not care about the midterms” and “we know that that is not true,” and Hannity’s reply was that “nothing would surprise me with this president.” Friday morning Doocy made the same point on Fox & Friends, telling viewers “we can fact-check President Trump here” because “he obviously does care a lot about the midterms.” El-Sayed’s campaign ran about 130 ads on Fox News in the first six days of October, roughly twice as many as on ESPN, and Michigan Republican strategist Jason Roe told Axios the network is “in business to make money, and he attracts eyeballs.”
TAKEAWAY: Sorry to be “that guy” but I’ve written FOUR columns over the past few weeks about this very subject, much to the frustration of network executives. After Baritromo’s ouster, I wrote about everyone missing the bigger story that Fox News was not in sync with the White House. After Trump’s midterm convention speech failed to improve on Fox News normal programming, I called it a “Ratings Disaster.” When third-quarter ratings came out, I directly tied Fox News's dip in viewership to Trump’s spiraling approval ratings, and on Monday I mocked Trump’s continued attack on Fox News coverage as “Blaming the Victim.” In short, if you need to be informed of what nabobs will natter about before they realize it? Subscribe to this Substack!
Thanks for reading,
That Guy.
“We got caught with our pants down. We did not prepare.”
That’s Rich McCormick, Republican congressman from Georgia, on CNN’s The Lead Thursday, adding to the increasingly common Republican criticism of the Trump administration’s handling of the Iran war. Asked by Jake Tapper whether another strike on Iran would make his constituents’ finances worse, he called high gas prices “a temporary blip,” blamed “both parties” for leaving the country unprepared, and said it was “unfortunate we’re not investing” in fellow Georgia Republican Mike Collins’s Senate race against Jon Ossoff.
Justice Department Seeks a Hutchinson Indictment: The Civil Rights Division presented evidence to a federal grand jury this week seeking to indict Cassidy Hutchinson, the former White House aide who testified to the Jan. 6 committee, on charges of lying to Congress. (Punchbowl News)
Ken Paxton Claims John Cornyn Wants Him to Lose: Texas Senate candidate Ken Paxton claimed that Senator John Cornyn is “clearly not helping. He wants me to lose.” This comes from yet another newly leaked audio recording from a September fundraiser that has sparked a number of headlines embarrassing to the embattled candidate. (CNN)
Microsoft and Adobe Lose Their Green Card Pipeline: The Labor Department suspended Microsoft, Adobe and six IT outsourcing firms from the program that lets employers sponsor foreign workers for permanent residency, accusing them of fraud, and the administration says Microsoft laid off 6,000 Americans last year while taking on 6,300 H-1B visas. Microsoft says most of its US employees are Americans and that it pays H-1B workers "the same as any other employees doing comparable work." (CNBC)
Based on transcripts from the 6 and 7 a.m. hours of Fox & Friends, CNN This Morning, News Central, and Morning Joe.
It’s too early to declare a winner in Thursday night’s debate between Michigan Senate candidates Mike Rogers and Abdul El-Sayed, but the approach that each took is revealing. Rogers hammered El-Sayed on, well, El-Sayed, choosing to parrot the socialist caricature familiar to anyone who’s watched any Fox News coverage over the past couple of months. El-Sayed opted instead to go after Trump, in particular, the increasingly unpopular policies like the Iran War, and the high gas prices that have come with it, health care, and ICE. He also made clear that Rogers has been a loyal supporter of the president’s policies and has the Trump Stink™, as the most recent Pew poll shows Trump’s midterm rally support for embattled Republican candidates looks far more harmful than helpful. In simpler terms, the more Trump talks, the worse it gets for the GOP.
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