CNN Can’t Seem to Understand Why Trump’s Approval Ratings Are Climbing Beyond Expectations

Bear with this author while he goes through what sounds like a critique of President Donald Trump: For better or for worse, what you see is what you get with Trump, rough edges and all.

And in today’s politically disingenuous world, that’s actually a wonderful thing.

It’s such a simple concept. Americans are sick and tired of the status quo, with deeply entrenched politicians seemingly more infatuated with lining their own pockets than helping out constituents.

Trump doesn’t speak or behave like your traditional politician, and he certainly doesn’t act like any number of stodgy U.S. presidents of the past. Trump sold himself as a disruptive maverick. His entire campaign platform was an easy sell for the millions of disenfranchised Americans who had lost faith in the swampy federal government.

It’s not rocket science — and yet CNN can’t seem to wrap its Trump-addled brain around the concept.

On Friday, CNN’s resident data guru Harry Enten d a clip of himself explaining a sudden rise in Trump’s approval rating to the network’s John Berman, and try as they might, the two of them just couldn’t quite land on the truth about the president.

Time for a reality check… I think some folks thought Trump’s approval rating would keep falling, but it’s rising.

Ipsos has his net approval going from -8 pts to -1 pt with voters. Aggregate has him up higher than late April too & much higher than at this point in term 1. pic.twitter.com/uP0xYvnnnZ

— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) May 16, 2025

“I think it’s time for a bit of a reality check, right?” Enten began in the clip. “We were going to late April, Donald Trump’s approval rating seemed to be falling.”

The CNN data analyst accompanied that with an exaggerated downward motion, showing how those ratings were expected to go.

Turns out, by virtually any metric, those approval ratings have rebounded.

Citing a Reuters/Ipsos poll, Enten revealed that Trump’s April 21 approval rating of -8 had melted away to just a single negative point.

Even Enten’s own aggregation models show Trump jumping from -9 in late April to just -6 now. Both of those numbers represent a seismic shift from the same point during Trump’s first term, when he found himself 15 points underwater.

“He is rising from the dead,” Enten described.

And, sure, yeah, political zombie stuff aside, Trump’s rebounding in the polling by a notable margin — despite the best efforts of his critics to blame him for anything and everything going wrong these days.

But why?

Well, as Enten and Berman (the latter being rather snide about it all) would explain, they think it’s exclusively about the economy, and how Trump’s tariffs weren’t quite the bogeyman that the left — including CNN — made it seem.

And they’re half-right about that, in fairness.

Despite some earnest fear-mongering from the left, the tariffs that Trump applied to help balance world trade deficits … are actually kind of working.

So of course people are happy about it, and thus Trump’s approvals are rebounding.

But it’s not just about Trump’s tariff gambit — it’s about what it represented.

Again, Trump, unlike any politician before him, is a disruptive force. And you don’t shake things up by staying the course. Trump came in, warned that some eggs might get broken, shook things up, broke those eggs, and now world titans like China are coming to the table ready to make deals.

In other words, shaking up the status quo worked — warts and all.

Were people justified in being concerned about the volatility associated with breaking the political norm, as Trump so clearly signaled he would do? Of course they are, and that likely contributed to some of those residual poor approval ratings in April.

But the instant people saw that Trump’s maverick stratagies were working, they quit worrying so much.

CNN almost got it right, in that the economy is what spurred this Trump turnaround. It certainly played a part.

But, it’s also about so much more than that, and until CNN and the left truly “get it,” they will forever misunderstand why Trump is the political force that he is.

To quote the Chinese military philosopher Sun Tzu: “If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.”

And the left knows a lot about defeat lately.

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