Majority of Americans say Trump policies made country, their lives worse as his big speech looms

The majority of Americans said they think the country is moving in a negative direction under President Donald Trump, according to a poll released Monday.

The NPR/PBS News/Marist poll found that 55% of U.S. adults said Trump is moving the nation in a worse direction, 37% said he has made positive change and 8% said the president’s leadership is producing no real change at all. The poll’s release comes a day before Trump is scheduled to give the first official State of the Union address of his second presidency on Tuesday night.

The 18-point gap between the percentage of respondents who said the nation is changing for the worse and the percentage who said it’s changing for the better is double what it was less than a year earlier. In Marist’s April 2025 survey, 51% of respondents said the nation’s trajectory under Trump was a change for the worse, while 42% said it was a change for the better.

The White House did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

Moreover, 53% of Americans said Trump’s policies have had a mostly negative personal impact on them, marking an increase from 49% who said the same last April, according to the poll. The survey also shows that 30% of respondents reported that their personal effect of the administration has been mostly positive while 17% say its policies have had no impact on them.

Meanwhile, 85% of Democrats, 58% of independents and 13% of Republicans said that Trump’s policies have been harmful to them personally, per the poll. Still, almost seven in ten Republicans, or 69%, say his policies have benefited them personally, the survey shows.

“It’s not unusual for a president having a long ‘to do’ list for the [State of the Union address], but President Trump’s ‘check list’ seems exceptionally large,” Lee Miringoff, director of the Marist University Institute for Public Opinion, which conducts the survey, told NPR on Monday.

Trump’s address represents “a big opportunity for him to try to reset with the nation, but it’s a tall order when views about him are so baked in,” Miringoff said, NPR reported.

A dozen congressional Democrats announced Wednesday they plan to boycott the president’s State of the Union address and will instead host their own Washington, D.C. rally.

Democratic Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger will give her party’s official response to Trump’s address on Tuesday, per a joint statement from House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer released on Feb. 19. Democratic California Sen. Alex Padilla is set to give the Democratic response in Spanish on Tuesday, according to a Feb. 19 news release.

The NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll survey of 1,462 adults nationwide was conducted from Jan. 27-30, by the Marist Poll in partnership with NPR and PBS News. U.S. adults were contacted through a multi-mode design: By phone using live interviewers, by text, or online.

Results for all adults (n= 1,462) are statistically significant within plus or minus 2.9 percentage points, while results for registered U.S. voters (n=1,326) are statistically significant within plus or minus 3.0 percentage points.

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