President Donald Trump faced the second-highest disapproval rating of the past 70 years when he left the White House in 2021.

President Donald Trump faced the second-highest disapproval rating of the past 70 years when he left the White House in 2021. Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now.

President Donald Trump is seeking to rewrite US immigration policies, has reshaped how world leaders use social media, and has made historic changes to the federal workforce.

But in his first term, he made history in a way he may wish to forget: He was the first president since Gallup began tracking presidential job approval in the 1930s to fail to exceed a 50% approval rating at any point during his term.

In Gallup’s latest poll, conducted during the first half of May, 43% of respondents said they approved of Trump’s performance, down from 47% in polling conducted during the first six days of his second term in January.

In the recent poll, 53% said they disapproved of his handling of the presidency. This number has held steady since March, a month rocked by leaked Signal chats and the economic shake-up of tariff policies. (A handful of people in each poll said they had no opinion of Trump’s job performance.)

For nearly a century, the polls have been used to measure the public’s perception of US presidents’ performance, with Gallup asking Americans: “Do you approve or disapprove of the way [the current president] is handling his job as president?”

The American Presidency Project from the University of California, Santa Barbara, compiled the final Gallup ratings of each president’s term from the past 70 years, signaling how popular each leader was when they left the Oval Office.

See how US presidents from Harry Truman to Joe Biden rank in this end-of-term polling. We’ve ordered them from the lowest approval rating to the highest.