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WASHINGTON (AP) — Most Americans continue to disapprove of how President Donald Trump is handling Iran, while his overall presidential approval holds steady, according to a new AP-NORC poll that was conducted as he suggested a deal with Iran had been reached.
The poll points to just how unpopular the war, which began Feb. 28, has been with Americans even as the Republican president turned abruptly from threatening Iran to reopening negotiations. Support for his handling of the war remains lopsidedly partisan. About two-thirds, 65%, of U.S. adults disapprove of how Trump is handling issues with Iran. But while the vast majority of Democrats and independents view Trump’s actions negatively, only 28% of Republicans are unhappy.
Americans’ views on how the president is handling Iran are roughly in line with his overall job approval, which stands at 37%, unchanged from an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in May.
The new survey was conducted June 11-17, just after Trump called off threats to escalate the war with Iran. The poll was fielded as Trump announced a deal with Iran and authorized an end to the U.S. naval blockade in the Strait of Hormuz, concluding just before the deal was signed Wednesday.
Approval of Trump’s actions on Iran has been low over the past few months. But in interviews, some Republicans also weren’t pleased with the outcome of this week’s agreement, which gives Iran an immediate benefit, allowing it to sell its oil freely again.
The deal also reopens the strait without tolls for two months, restarts talks between the U.S. and Iran over Tehran’s nuclear program and calls for Tehran to dilute its stockpile of highly enriched uranium.
David Farrington, a 79-year-old Republican-leaning independent in Fort Worth, Texas, “doesn’t have any love lost” for Iran, but he’s frustrated the agreement focused on the strait and didn’t deliver more on the country’s nuclear weapons program.
“Any agreement regarding the strait is hardly what I would consider a recognizable concession on the part of Iran,” Farrington said. “So, I consider that some fluff that attempts to make this agreement look better when it’s not.”
Trump’s approval on Iran remains flat
Only about one-third of U.S. adults approve of how Trump is handling Iran in the new poll, in line with May.
Donald McBride, a 28-year-old independent in Plano, Texas, is frustrated that Trump has not maintained his campaign promise to keep America out of foreign wars. McBride voted for Trump but he opposed going to war with Iran.
“I would like the war to end,” he said. “The original objective of the war was to end the Iranian regime, and that’s just not possible. I don’t really know why we’d continue fighting.”
The poll suggests most Americans want action in Iran to wrap up. Even with an agreement on the horizon, 53% of U.S. adults said American military action against Iran had “gone too far,” only a slight decline from 59% in March.
About 4 in 10 Republicans, though, said in the latest poll that action has been “about right,” and 37% said it had not gone far enough.
Joan Jones, a 64-year-old independent in northwest Florida, believes the United States’ actions in Iran have been necessary to address the threat Iran posed.
“Those attacks are ultimately to protect us from nuclear attacks,” Jones said. “I think we have to go through that … and eliminate that worry so we don’t have that hovering over us.”
Few approve of Trump’s approach on Israel
About one-third, 34%, of U.S. adults approve of how Trump is handling Israel.
Tensions have been rising between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump as the president criticizes recent Israeli attacks in Lebanon, which jeopardized negotiations between Washington and Tehran.
James Huffman, a 69-year-old Republican in Medway, Ohio, thinks Trump is taking the wrong strategy when it comes to Netanyahu.
“Netanyahu is not going to do everything Trump wants. He’s going to do what he wants,” Huffman said. “I just don’t think it’s effective.”
Only about one-third approve on the economy
About one-third of U.S. adults approve of Trump’s approach to the economy. That’s in line with last month, and continues a challenging stretch for Trump on the issue.
Jones, the Florida independent, is more optimistic than most. She said she can hardly leave the house some hours without getting stuck in the traffic of tourists headed to the beach on vacation. She also spots lines around the block for Starbucks, McDonalds and Chick-fil-A in her community — all signs to her that the economy is doing well overall.
“I think President Trump’s policies are contributing to a better economy,” Jones said.
Other Republicans are more skeptical, a troubling sign for a president who prides himself on his business acumen. Only 69% of Republicans approve of how he’s handling the economy, slightly lower than the 78% who approve of how he’s handling the presidency overall.
Patricia Bailey, a 42-year-old Republican in Parkersburg, West Virginia, sees an economy where prices have gotten out of control. “I just said the other night, ordering pizza is for rich people,” she said. Bailey voted for Trump but added, “He’s kind of let me down a little bit.”
Even if high prices preceded Trump, Bailey doesn’t think he’s lived up to his pledge to improve the economy.
“I think he got so distracted with the war that he forgot some old promises,” she said.
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The AP-NORC poll of 3,040 adults was conducted June 11-17 using a sample drawn from NORC’s probability-based AmeriSpeak Panel, which is designed to be representative of the U.S. population. The margin of sampling error for adults overall is plus or minus 2.8 percentage points.
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Goldstein: 6.5Tone: 60.0CAMEO 06
What you need to know about the preliminary U.S.-Iran agreement signed by Trump
Vice President JD Vance has delayed his trip to Switzerland to negotiate the terms of a peace agreement with Iran on Friday.
It's unclear exactly why the talks were called off at the last minute, with hundreds of journalists already waiting in the alpine city of Lucerne.
But the delay raises questions over the sturdiness of the memorandum of understanding to end the war, signed by Trump on Wednesday.
It came as Israel continued to heavily bombard Lebanon, despite the agreement promising to end all military operations, including in Lebanon.
Lebanese media said at least 18 were killed in overnight strikes, and Israel said four of its soldiers had been killed in fighting in southern Lebanon.
Here are more details about the agreement and challenges they face in this latest effort to end the conflict:
US lifts naval blockade
There was immediate progress after the preliminary agreement to end the three-and-half month conflict that has killed thousands of people across the Middle East, rocked the global economy and pushed millions more into poverty around the world, according to the United Nations.
The United States lifted its naval blockade on Iran.
The short memorandum of understanding also promises to end military operations on all fronts and reopen the Strait of Hormuz, the crucial waterway through which much of the world's oil, gas and fertilizer must pass to reach global markets.
The agreement prompted President Trump to celebrate on Truth Social writing: "Ships of the World, start your engines. Let the oil flow!"
But there are still many potential pitfalls. Even before the agreement was signed, Trump made its fragility clear: "It's a memorandum of understanding," he said at the G7 summit in France. "If I don't like it, if they don't behave, we'll go right back to dropping bombs right smack in the middle of their head."
The document doesn't solve the underlying reason for why the United States and Israel went to war with Iran. It creates a 60-day window — extendable by mutual agreement — for the two sides to resolve the enmity that goes back many decades.
Israel remains defiant against the deal
The preliminary agreement promises to end all military operations, including in Lebanon. Israel has invaded and taken large swaths of southern Lebanon in an offensive it says is targeting the Iranian-backed militia Hezbollah, which has killed more than 3,800 people, according to Lebanon's Health Ministry.
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has made clear that Iran considers Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon essential. "Without the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the territories they occupied during this war, the war has not fully come to an end," Araghchi said.
Israel wasn't involved in the negotiations with Iran — though Trump said at a press conference this week that he had sent Israel a copy of the document before he signed it. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has remained defiant, saying his troops will remain in southern Lebanon for as long as Israel's security requires it.
The conflict in Lebanon is causing an extraordinarily open rift between Trump and Netanyahu. "He's a very difficult guy," Trump said of the Israeli prime minister recently said to The New York Times.
On Thursday, Israel's military released a new map showing an expanded area of southern Lebanon occupied by its troops, which it describes as a buffer zone.
"Trump's agreement does not bind us," Israel's far-right national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, wrote on social media on Monday. "We are not partners to this agreement that does not ensure our security."
Vice President Vance hit back at critics in the Israeli government, warning at a press conference that "Donald J. Trump is the only head of state in the entire world who is sympathetic to the nation of Israel at this moment in time."
Trump signed the deal to avoid "economic catastrophe"
The agreement promises "the immediate and permanent termination of military operations on all fronts" — including in Lebanon, where Israel has continued its offensive. Iran and the United States also promise "not to initiate" any further war or operation against each other. Not long after Trump signed the memorandum, U.S. Central Command said Thursday it had ended its naval blockade of ships to and from Iranian ports, as promised in the agreement.
Iranian state media reported the country's national security council will suspend tolls paid by ships for 60 days, per the deal, but that ships must still request Iran's permission — through a newly established Persian Gulf Strait Authority, before passing through the Strait of Hormuz, which was once considered an international waterway.
Increased ship traffic through the strait will come as a relief to Trump, whose approval ratings have been sliding as Americans see soaring gasoline prices and spiking inflation. Last month Trump insisted he doesn't think about Americans' financial situation in his approach to Iran.
But this week he acknowledged at a news conference that he had signed this agreement because he "didn't want to see an economic catastrophe."
The memorandum gives major concessions to Iran
Trump has repeatedly called the Iran nuclear deal — formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — presided over by President Barack Obama in 2015 the "worst deal ever," and Trump abandoned the agreement in his first term in office. But the framework agreement signed this week hands major financial concessions to Iran that could ultimately go much further than the Obama-era arrangement.
The document says the U.S. will work with regional partners to create a fund of "at least $300 billion" for Iran's reconstruction and economic development. Vice President Vance has said Gulf Arab nations would invest that amount.
It also promises that the U.S. will unfreeze Iranian funds and assets that amount potentially to tens of billions of dollars. Mohsen Rezaei, military adviser to Supreme Leader Mojtaba Khamenei, told CNN Iran wants to see the release of $24 billion.
These commitments do depend on further negotiations. But the Trump administration also plans to issue sanction waivers to allow Iran to immediately sell its oil. The waiver concedes a major point of potential leverage at the start of these 60-day talks.
And the interim deal also opens the door to ending all U.S. and international sanctions on Iran. Iran has been under a plethora of U.S. sanctions since the 1979 Revolution. The penalties have kept Iran cut off from the global economy, preventing it, for example, from accessing the international banking sector. This new pledge goes far beyond the JCPOA deal, which removed some sanctions in exchange for Iran reducing its stockpile of uranium.
The negotiation over Iran's nuclear program
President Trump has boasted he will achieve a much "better" agreement than the JCPOA. The substantive talks on this are yet to begin, but so far, the commitment Iran has made in the memorandum that it "shall not procure or develop nuclear weapons" is the same promise it has made for years, including in the 2015 nuclear accord.
The details of Iran's nuclear program are complex and technical. The JCPOA was negotiated over years by the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Russia and China, with nuclear physicists and non-proliferation experts, and ran to 159 pages. Trump's framework was negotiated bilaterally by Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner — a property developer and the president's son-in-law. An Iranian diplomat who spoke to NPR on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly told NPR they believed the last round of talks with the Trump administration did not progress because "the Americans at the table did not understand the subject."
The U.S. had been negotiating with Iran over its nuclear program before abruptly launching the bombing campaign with Israel on Tehran that began this
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Poll: Most Americans have the summer blues about Trump and the economy
Poll: Most Americans have the summer blues about Trump and the economy
As concern over gas prices remains high, President Trump's approval ratings continue falling to record lows, especially over his handling of the economy, according to the latest NPR/PBS News/Marist poll.
Only a third of Americans say they approve of how Trump is handling the economy — three points lower than the worst marks given to former President Joe Biden during his term.
Just 36% say they approve of Trump's overall job performance, while 59% say they disapprove, which is the widest gap Trump has faced during either term in office.
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In a midterm election year where Democrats show more enthusiasm to vote and see a path to regain control of both the House and Senate, notably 22% of Republicans say they disapprove of Trump's handling of the economy. The share of Republicans who say they strongly approve of Trump's job performance dropped to 53% in June from 61% in April.
Regina Kulenga, a 36-year-old Trump voter in Georgia, told NPR that she wasn't sure if she would vote in the midterm elections and called Trump's actions since returning to office a "slap in the face."
"The economy is suffering a lot right now, and I just feel like a lot of the things that he did promise, you know, we're still waiting," she said. "Honestly, I was a big Trump supporter in the beginning … and I'm like, someone needs to do something about it because he's not doing anything right now for the economy but making things, I feel, in my opinion, a lot worse than what they were."
While Kulenga drives an electric car and does not have to worry about high gas prices, she said family members are struggling with rising costs for transportation and groceries.
More than three-quarters of Americans continue to say gas prices are a strain on their budgets, even as average gas prices have fallen about 40 cents a gallon from a month ago, according to AAA. The survey was taken before the latest announcement of an agreement between the U.S. and Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz.
Those concerns have a real-world impact: 45% of Americans say they don't plan on taking a summer vacation this year, with about half of those people citing cost as the main reason.
The survey of 1,340 respondents was conducted June 8-11 and has a margin of error of +/- 3.0 percentage points, meaning results could be about 3 points higher or lower. Respondents were reached by live caller, text and online.
Trump — and his economy — continue to be unpopular
The erosion in Trump's support continues to cut across multiple demographic groups that were key to his victory in 2024.
- Among independent voters, 64% continue to disapprove or strongly disapprove of Trump's performance, the same as April's survey, along with 94% of Democrats and 18% of Republicans.
- Approval among Gen Z (25%), Gen X (36%) and those with a household income below $50,000 a year (34%) continued to decline from the last poll.
- In February 2025, Trump had a net positive approval rating of 22 points among rural Americans, but he is now 10 points underwater.
- By a roughly 2-to-1margin, Latinos disapprove of Trump's performance.
When specifically asked about the economy, only one-third of white Americans without a college degree say they approve of Trump's handling, down from nearly half in April 2025.
Still, the vast majority of Republicans are sticking by Trump, like 68-year-old Greg Votel, a retired law enforcement officer in Minnesota who said the president "can only do so much when you have a Congress that's fighting him tooth and nail to preserve the Democratic Party" and told NPR that it will take more time for Trump's plans to come to fruition.
"It doesn't happen overnight," he said. "It's going to take some time; it's going to probably take at least two administrations. Trump's got the ball rolling."
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There are many economic factors working against Republicans this year, including high inflation, the ongoing war in Iran, higher gas prices and Trump administration policies around tariffs, among others.
The Americans surveyed express concerns about the way those policies are affecting household decisions. When asked if they planned to take a vacation this summer, a similar share of respondents said yes (55%) compared to the last time the question was asked in 2025 and 2021. This year, cost was listed as a top factor against planning a trip, with those with a household income under $50,000, Gen X and those outside large cities and suburbs more likely to choose that reason.
Vacation or not, two-thirds of adults say cost has had some or a great deal of impact on their summer plans, including 53% of Republicans and 49% of those over 60.
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Goldstein: 0.0Tone: -71.4CAMEO 01
What Wisconsin swing voters say about Trump, the Iran war and America at 250
What Wisconsin swing voters say about Trump, the Iran war and America at 250
Swing voters from Wisconsin share their thoughts on the Iran war, high prices and how they're feeling about America at its 250th year marker.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
The Trump administration says that it has a tentative agreement to end the war in Iran, a war that has been pretty unpopular among Americans. Last night, NPR's senior national political correspondent Mara Liasson heard from some of those Americans. She observed two focus groups of swing voters who backed President Trump in 2024. Hi, Mara.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Hi there.
CHANG: Hi. OK, so what did you hear from these voters?
LIASSON: Well, last night was our latest set of monthly focus groups in battleground states. These are conducted by the market research firms Engagious and Sago. They aren't polls. These focus groups do not give us scientifically significant data, but we've consistently heard comments about the Iran war that illustrate polling. The war is unpopular. People are upset that it's raised their gas prices, and they want Trump to focus on their needs at home. What was different last night was that even though they were told about this tentative agreement to end the war, it's not like these voters were celebrating. They said it wasn't worth it. All these voters are from Wisconsin. They're only identified by their first names. Here's Tammy.
TAMMY: I just don't think that it was fair to the American people. I don't think that anybody was a real winner here. I think we just suffered in the midst of them playing tug-of-war.
LIASSON: Another voter said all it accomplished was, quote, "the square root of nothing."
CHANG: Dang. OK. But do you think these perceptions might change? I mean, assuming the war does come to an end and, say, like, gas prices go down.
LIASSON: Yeah. Well, that's the big question. A couple of voters who disapprove of Trump said that something could - that could change their mind would be $3-a-gallon gas. Another voter, Sam, compared this framework deal to the Iran nuclear deal forged by President Obama, which Trump has hammered on for years. And Sam said he's skeptical that this would have any different outcome than the Obama deal on Iran's nuclear capabilities.
CHANG: Well, what else stood out to you about these voters last night?
LIASSON: Well, something that stood out was just a sense of frustration and cynicism about politics, about politicians, certainly about Trump. One question that was asked last night was about Trump's birthday. He just turned 80, and the voters were asked whether they had a birthday message for the president. Here are Corey, Robyn and Amanda.
COREY: Happy birthday, Mr. President. What are you doing to ensure that when we get to the age that you are that we're gonna have America that we grew up learning about?
ROBIN: I would have said I would have bought you a cake, but I can't afford one, but happy birthday.
AMANDA: It must have really felt good to be able to do whatever you want on your birthday. America doesn't have that luxury but he does.
CHANG: Wow. It's kind of brutal. I mean, just reminding everybody, these are voters who supported President Trump in 2024.
LIASSON: That's right. They swung from supporting Joe Biden - all of them - in 2020 to all of them voting for Trump in 2024. So they represent a key sliver of voters who are very important because they help decide elections.
CHANG: Exactly.
LIASSON: Now, here's Corey again, who has now turned against Trump, and he mentioned Trump's conduct in office.
COREY: I like to think if I was at work or any of us were at work and we behaved in the manner that he displays sometimes, we would have some HR issues or potentially lead to termination.
LIASSON: This is important, though. We've consistently found that Democrats are not popular with these swing voters either. They say they're either too weak or too far left, so it creates a lot of uncertainty for the midterms.
CHANG: Definitely does. OK. So these voters - they were asked about Trump's birthday. But I understand they were also asked about the 250th birthday of the whole country, which is this year. Was there anything in those answers that you found interesting?
LIASSON: Yes. There were people who said they're very patriotic. They would celebrate America and its progress despite flaws or how they feel about politics today. One voter said, quote, "America is more than the sum of the last four years." But there was also a lot of ambivalence. One voter said they thought Trump and his treatment of the holiday had made the anniversary feel, quote, "yucky."
CHANG: That is NPR's senior national political correspondent Mara Liasson. Thank you so much, Mara.
LIASSON: You're welcome.
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