New polls reveal which White House term showed stronger polling numbers for Trump

President Donald Trump is expected to showcase the avalanche of activity during his first six weeks in the White House when he heads to Capitol Hill on Tuesday to deliver a primetime address to Congress and the nation.

'Best Opening Month of any President in history,' Trump wrote in a social media post last week, as he touted his accomplishments - many of them controversial - since his Jan. 20 inauguration.

Trump, on the eve of his first major speech to Congress during his second presidential administration, vowed that 'TOMORROW NIGHT WILL BE BIG. I WILL TELL IT LIKE IT IS!'

However, the latest polls indicate Americans are divided on the job he's done so far in the White House.

Trump stands at 45% approval and 49% disapproval in one of the latest polls, a Marist College for PBS News and NPR. Additionally, a CNN survey, also conducted last week, put the president's approval rating at 48%, with 52% disapproving. 

Meanwhile, Trump's approval ratings were slightly above water in other new polls, including one for CBS News that was also in the field in recent days and released over the weekend.

With the president an extremely polarizing and larger-than-life politician, it is no surprise that the latest polls indicate a massive partisan divide over Trump's performance. The surveys spotlight that the vast majority of Democrats give the president a big thumbs down, while Republicans overwhelmingly approve of the job he is doing in office.

While Americans are split on Trump's performance, the approval ratings for his second term are an improvement from his first tour of duty, when he started 2017 in negative territory and remained underwater throughout his four-year tenure in the White House.

One reason - Trump nowadays enjoys rock solid Republican support.

'He never had support among Democrats in the first administration, but he also had some trouble with Republicans,' Daron Shaw, a politics professor and chair at the University of Texas, noted.

Shaw, who serves as a member of the Fox News Decision Team and the Republican partner on the Fox News Poll, emphasized 'that’s one acute difference between 2017 and 2025. The party’s completely solidified behind him.'

Trump has been moving at warp speed during his opening six weeks back in the White House with a flurry of executive orders and actions. His moves not only fulfilled some of his major campaign trail promises, but also allowed the returning president to flex his executive muscles, quickly put his stamp on the federal government, make major cuts to the federal workforce and also settle some long-standing grievances.

Trump as of Monday had signed 81 executive orders since his Jan. 20 inauguration, according to a count from Fox News, which far surpasses the rate of any recent presidential predecessors during their first weeks in office.

Expect Trump in his address to Congress and the nation to showcase the moves – many of them controversial – that he has taken so far. That includes a high-profile crackdown on immigration, threatening tariffs on major trading partners, including Canada and Mexico, and upending the nation's international agenda and freezing foreign aid.

'It’s been a flooding-of-the-zone here every day, often multiple times a day,' Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, told Fox News Digital. 'We’re just seeing a lot of things happening with little time for the public to digest. The net effect of it all is there’s a sense, on the part of the public, that some things are moving just a little too fast.'

While an improvement over his first term, Trump's approval ratings are lower six weeks into his presidency than any of his recent predecessors in the White House.

Shaw noted that neither Trump nor former President Joe Biden 'started out with overwhelming approval. This is not like the honeymoon period that we historically expect presidents to enjoy….Historically the other side gives you a little bit of leeway when you first come in. That just doesn’t happen anymore.'

Biden's approval rating hovered in the low to mid 50s during the first six months of his single term as president, with his disapproval in the upper 30s to the low to mid 40s. 

However, Biden's numbers sank into negative territory in the late summer and autumn of 2021, in the wake of his much-criticized handling of the turbulent U.S. exit from Afghanistan and amid soaring inflation and a surge of migrants crossing into the U.S. along the nation's southern border with Mexico.

Biden's approval ratings stayed underwater throughout the rest of his presidency.

'He just got crippled and never recovered,' Shaw said of Biden.

An average of all the most recent national polls indicates that Trump's approval ratings are just above water. However, Trump has seen his numbers edge down slightly since returning to the White House in late January, when an average of his polls indicated the president's approval rating in the low 50s and his disapproval in the mid 40s.

'The honeymoon is over, and he's actually governing, and that typically does bring numbers down,' veteran political scientist Wayne Lesperance, the president of New Hampshire-based New England College, told Fox News Digital. 'I expect the numbers to continue to slip as the changes in Washington really do begin to impact people's everyday lives.'

Shaw noted that Trump's 'rating on the economy is about minus four, which is 25 points better than Biden. He’s above water on immigration. His best issue right now is crime. He’s plus ten on crime.'

However, Shaw emphasized that inflation, the issue that helped propel Trump back into the White House, remains critical to the president's political fortunes.

'If prices remain high, he’s going to have trouble,' Shaw warned.