President Donald Trump enjoyed a bump in his approval rating after meeting with Vladimir Putin in the hope of securing an end to the Ukraine war last week, according to a new poll.
Although the president did not come away with any definite commitment to peace after three hours of talks with the Russian president and has faced criticism of his handling of the summit, he appears to have improved his standing in the eyes of the American public.
An InsiderAdvantage survey conducted over the weekend finds Trump enjoying the support of 54 percent of respondents, with 44 percent disapproving of his job performance and the remaining 2 percent unsure. According to pollster Nate Silver, InsiderAdvantage slightly favored Trump in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election.
That represents a 4 percent improvement in his approval rating month-on-month, with the president seeing only 50 percent of voters approving of his performance in July in a survey from the same source. That poll came during the period when the Jeffrey Epstein files furore dominated the news cycle.
The new InsiderAdvantage poll is more favorable to Trump than most others of late, with a YouGov tracker last month finding that 57 percent of people were unhappy with his actions in the White House. Only 13 percent held a positive opinion on his record so far.
Trump’s popularity is likely to continue to fluctuate. It could move again after his meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Washington on Monday, which will also be attended by European heads of state Keir Starmer, Emmanuel Macron, and Friedrich Merz.
The last time Zelensky visited the White House on February 28, he was severely criticized by Trump and Vice President JD Vance, who accused him of displaying an entitled attitude towards his allies and expressing insufficient gratitude for their support three years on from Russia’s invasion of his homeland.
Despite the president’s aggression towards Zelensky attracting international condemnation, it did not make much impact on his domestic approval rating, which, according to Emerson College polling released in early March, held steady month-on-month at 48 percent.
Trump’s disapproval rating did rise one point to 43 percent over the clash. Still, the findings indicated that, overall, few were sufficiently surprised by the president’s conduct for it to have altered their opinion of him.
For Zelensky, however, the heated exchange in the Oval Office saw his approval rating soar from 57 percent to 68 percent among Ukrainians, according to a poll published by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology a week later, with many of his fellow countrymen feeling he had been poorly treated by his hosts and reacting sympathetically.
Another major international meeting during Trump’s first term, his historic summit with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un in Singapore in June 2018, likewise failed to yield a significant shift in his approval rating.
Instead, the surreal encounter between the two men left the American’s popularity unchanged at 41 percent, according to a poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research published at the time.
That said, the event itself was approved of by a 55 percent majority of respondents to the same survey, suggesting most people approved of the effort to bring Kim’s rogue nuclear state in from the cold but were reluctant to give Trump the credit for bringing him to the table.
