The White House can live with bad headlines. What it cannot live with is a bad headline that starts showing up inside its own coalition, and then gets reinforced by a clean-up attempt that the president himself reverses.
What You Should Know
The PBS News/NPR/Marist poll discussed on PBS NewsHour found a majority of Americans disapprove of President Trump’s job performance, with many strongly disapproving. Analysts said key groups, including independents and some white working-class voters, have softened since he took office again.
On February 9th, 2026, PBS NewsHour host Geoff Bennett brought on NPR’s Tamara Keith and Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report With Amy Walter to talk polling, midterm stakes, and a familiar Trump-era pattern: a message, a scramble, and then the president saying the quiet part out loud.
The segment’s hook was straightforward. A new PBS News/NPR/Marist poll shows Trump sitting in net-negative territory, with opposition that is not just broad but intense. That second part is the part that makes party strategists reach for antacids, because intensity tends to vote, donate, and volunteer.
The Poll Detail That Raises the Real Alarm
Walter said the new numbers look even worse when they are placed into a larger polling picture. She told PBS NewsHour that the poll was added to the Cook Political Report’s tracker, an aggregation of 21 national polls, and it shows Trump at his lowest standing of his second term at this point.
But the most revealing detail was not simply that disapproval exists. It was which blocs are driving it, and which ones appear to be wobbling.
According to Walter, the slippage is being driven by groups that had warmed to Trump around the time he was sworn in for his second term, including Latino voters, younger voters, and independent voters. That is the coalition-expansion theory of Trump politics running into gravity.
Then she named the group that usually gets treated as load-bearing: white working-class voters. They have been central to Trump’s modern Republican Party, and they are heavily represented in battleground states that decide control of Congress.
Walter said Trump is not doing worse with Republicans overall, but his approval among white working-class voters has shrunk by about nine points since the prior year. If you are a House Republican in a district where a few thousand working-class swing voters can end your career, nine points is not a rounding error. It is a problem that walks into town with a clipboard.
Trump Says the Base Is the Base, Then He Dares the Math to Argue
Keith, who was on Air Force One, described a president who is leaning into his preferred political geometry: treat the base as the campaign, and treat everyone else as optional.
When reporters pressed Trump, Keith said he emphasized the strength of his core supporters. In the segment, his posture was summarized with a line that captures the strategy and the risk: “My base has never been stronger.”
Keith added that Trump framed the “America First” base as both his anchor and his explanation. If your governing incentives are shaped primarily by what keeps the base locked in, then coalition growth can become a temporary side effect instead of a long-term priority.
That is where the poll tension lives. The same approach that thrills a core audience can alienate the expansion voters who showed up in 2024 and are now drifting. It is not that those voters suddenly became Democrats. It is that they can become absent, indifferent, or persuadable, which is often worse.
Keith also offered a historical comparison that is hard for any West Wing to enjoy. She said the intensity of disapproval was essentially back to where it was after the January 6 events. That is a reminder that, for many voters, Trump politics is not just a set of policies. It is a running argument about conduct, power, and limits.
The Air Force One Cleanup Problem
Polling is the long-term problem. Messaging discipline is the daily one.
Bennett raised the episode involving a meme about the Obamas that Keith said had racially charged content. The detail that makes it politically combustible is not only what was posted, but the sequence that followed: initial blame-shifting, then a presidential acknowledgement that undercut the cleanup.
According to Bennett’s description of the timeline, the White House had denied wrongdoing and blamed a staffer earlier. Then, the program noted, the episode ended with Trump admitting he posted it.
Keith said the White House called the backlash “fake outrage,” while many Republicans urged removal. That matters because it exposes the split-screen inside Trump’s party. Publicly, many GOP officials still operate inside a loyalty economy. Privately, they still have to run in places where voters do not want their local member of Congress tied to every social media fire.
The segment described the removal as an admission of error, but also described Trump trying to shrink the responsibility. Keith said Trump told reporters he saw the beginning of the video but not the end, and believed he was sharing political context connected to the 2020 election. Then came the rhetorical escape hatch Trump often reaches for: no apology, no mistake.
In the transcript, the president’s stance was blunt. He argued there was no need to apologize, said he did not make a mistake, and claimed he was “the least racist president in a long time.”
This is the contradiction voters notice, and operatives dread. The White House line points away from the president. The president then points back at himself, but does not accept the kind of accountability that closes the story. It keeps the story alive, and it keeps the party tethered to it.
Affordability Is a Policy Fight, and a Permission Structure
Walter and Keith both tied the polling softness to a simple driver that does not care about ideology: the cost of living.
Walter said voters may be influenced by views on the economy, inflation, and affordability. She also said that, in battleground states that will likely determine the House and Senate, the electorate includes many white working-class voters, the same group showing signs of slippage.
That is the midterm trap. A president can argue the economy is booming and inflation is tame, but a voter who feels squeezed at the grocery store does not experience that as a quarterly report. They experience it as a weekly bill.
Walter’s advice for Republicans on the ballot was not about ideology or cable news positioning. It was transactional. If you are running next year, she said, you should focus on what you have done to address affordability.
The reason that advice matters is political physics. Affordability can be a permission structure for swing voters who want to vote Republican without feeling like they are endorsing every Trump controversy. If affordability is not improving, those voters may decide they do not need the permission structure at all. They can sit out, split their ticket, or vote for the other side as a protest.
The segment even nodded at how fast voter memory can reset. Walter noted studies suggesting refunds may be larger in one year than another, but whether people will remember by November is uncertain. That is another way of saying: good news that does not land emotionally, or does not show up in a bank account when it matters, is not durable.
Why the Stakes Are Bigger Than One Poll
No one poll is destiny, and Keith explicitly warned that it is a snapshot in time. That is the fair caveat. But the snapshot is still useful because it captures two connected vulnerabilities at once.
First, the coalition problem. If younger voters, independents, and Hispanic voters are cooling, Trump cannot afford meaningful erosion among white working-class voters in the same period. That is how a party ends up fighting for turnout in the same places it expected to dominate.
Second, the discipline problem. The meme episode, as laid out on PBS NewsHour, shows a familiar loop: staff try to contain the blast radius, and then Trump reopens the blast radius with his own words. Bennett framed it as a pattern, saying it is not the first time the White House tries to clean something up for the president, and then he reverses. Walter agreed, and she said they need him on message for their own sake and to keep the base motivated.
That last point is the hidden tension. Staying on message is not only about avoiding mistakes. It is about controlling the agenda. If Republicans want the midterms to be a referendum on prices, not posts, they need a president who is willing to let the story be about prices.
What to Watch Next
If the Cook Political Report tracker and the PBS News/NPR/Marist poll are capturing a real trend, the next indicators will not just be national approval numbers. Watch the cross-pressures inside the coalition.
Does the White House move from base-first signaling to broader persuasion, especially on affordability? Do congressional Republicans localize their campaigns around cost-of-living achievements, as Walter suggested, or do they get pulled into defending each new social media controversy?
And perhaps most telling, does the White House stop trying to separate Trump from Trump? The polling challenge and the messaging challenge are not separate stories. They are the same story, told from two different angles.
