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The number that should keep Republican strategists awake is 34. That is the share of Republicans in the new Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll who say their own president is using the office to get richer. A year ago, 22 percent of Republicans said it. The belief has grown 12 points inside Trump's own party while he was busy governing.
The toplines are bleak enough on their own. Trump's approval rating sits at 33 percent, the lowest in the history of the Post-ABC series, down from 37 percent in April and July. Sixty-six percent disapprove, and a majority of the country, 52 percent, disapproves strongly. But the approval number is almost beside the point. The more revealing finding is that two-thirds of Americans now believe the presidency, under this president, is a money-making operation.
That perception did not arrive out of nowhere. Trump hosted a cryptocurrency conference at Mar-a-Lago in April, the kind of image that does the opposition's work for it. Separate polling this month found 56 percent of Americans saying he has put a lot of emphasis on his personal businesses since returning to office, against only 23 percent who said he has prioritized the country's interests to the same degree. Presidents have always cashed in after leaving office. The accusation sticking to Trump, according to these numbers, is that he skipped the waiting period.
What makes this politically dangerous is the collision with pocketbook reality. Nearly half of respondents, 48 percent, say they are financially worse off than when Trump returned to the White House in 2025, the highest such reading for any president since the poll began asking in 1986. A president can survive being called corrupt if voters feel prosperous. He can survive being called ineffective if voters trust his motives. Trump is currently carrying both indictments at once: the public thinks he is doing well personally and doing badly by them. Inflation is feeding the sour mood, and the survey's political consequences are already visible. Among likely voters, the generic House ballot favors Democrats 52 to 44.
The credibility damage extends beyond money. Sixty-seven percent say Trump is not committed to protecting press freedom, and 61 percent question his commitment to free and fair elections. Those are not policy disagreements. They are doubts about whether the man accepts the basic terms of the job.
The timing could hardly be worse for his party. Election Day is November 3, and Republicans are defending a competitive Senate map that stretches through Alaska, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Michigan, Ohio and Texas. Midterms are historically brutal for the party in power, and this president enters the stretch with numbers weaker than the ones that preceded the 2018 blue wave, when Democrats netted 41 House seats. A Fox News poll released days earlier found the same thing, Trump's lowest approval in that network's polling across either of his terms, which suggests the slide is real and not a quirk of one survey.
There is a deeper irony here. Trump's original political brand rested on the claim that he was too rich to be bought. The argument in 2016 was that a billionaire owed nothing to donors and could not be corrupted by Washington's usual currencies. A decade later, the consensus view of the American public is that the wealth was never the shield. It was the point. Voters who once read his fortune as proof of independence now read the presidency as an extension of the portfolio, and a growing slice of his own voters is starting to agree.
Whether that shift holds through Election Day is the only question that matters now. Two-thirds of the country believing the president is on the take is the kind of number that usually shows up in the results.
Free Game Takeaway
Watch two things over the next two weeks. First, whether Republican candidates in competitive Senate races like Maine, Ohio and Iowa start distancing themselves from Trump, which would signal the party privately believes these numbers. Second, watch the 34 percent figure: if a third of Republicans believe the president is self-dealing, that depresses GOP turnout even in safe districts. For ordinary voters, the practical lesson is older than this poll: when a majority of the country believes an officeholder is profiting from the job and half say they are worse off, the remedy on offer is the ballot. If Democrats take a chamber, expect subpoena-driven scrutiny of Trump family business arrangements to dominate 2027, which will shape everything from markets exposed to Trump-linked ventures to the 2028 presidential field.