Congress’ Job Approval Jumps 70 Percent Since MAGA Took Over in January

The Founding Fathers expected elected legislators to remain closest to the sovereign people in both interests and affection. Those great men got many things right, but boy did they get that one wrong.

“Suppose you were an idiot,” literary legend Mark Twain once wrote. “And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.”

Nonetheless, according to a Gallup poll conducted Feb. 3-16, those beleaguered legislators may thank President Donald Trump for a 70 percent increase in their approval rating since Jan. 17, three days before the president’s inauguration.

Of course, one need not break out the champagne flutes just yet. After all, that approval rating could hardly have fallen much lower.

On Jan. 17, Gallup showed Congress with a 17 percent approval rating. In the latest poll, that number jumped to 29 percent.

Nor should we overstate the significance of Trump dragging unpopular legislators kicking and screaming toward respectability.

Recent history shows that Congress’ abysmal approval rating generally spikes when new presidents take office.

President Barack Obama carried Congress from 20 percent approval in Dec. 2008 to a high of 39 percent in March 2009. The same phenomenon occurred during Trump’s first administration and again under President Joe Biden.

Moreover, one might suspect that the most informed patriots in Trump’s MAGA movement would count themselves with the 71 percent.

After all, the best one can say about Congress is that so far it has done the bare minimum that Trump voters expect and has imposed no insurmountable obstacles to the president’s agenda.

For instance, Senate Republicans had no more than three defectors when they confirmed Trump’s most important Cabinet nominees. And those three “no” votes occurred during Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s January confirmation.

Since then, MAGA has imposed substantial pressure on GOP senators who might otherwise have voted with the establishment.

Billionaire Nicole Shanahan, 2024 running mate for former independent presidential candidate and now Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr., made a very public pledge to fund primary challenges to any senator who voted against Kennedy’s nomination.

Meanwhile, the GOP-controlled House of Representatives passed the Laken Riley Act. But it has done little else of note.

Congress, of course, has spent decades cementing its place as the federal government’s least-popular branch.

Here, for instance, is a clip showing hundreds of legislators waving Ukraine flags on the floor of Congress:

Dear Ukraine flag-waving American politicians who wrote blank checks to fund the war…

Where is the $100 billion of US military aid that went missing?!?

– The American taxpayers

CC: @DOGE pic.twitter.com/vQrHk1Jiy0

— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) February 19, 2025

Furthermore, now that Trump ally Elon Musk, owner of the social media platform X and head of the president’s Department of Government Efficiency, has effectively exposed Washington, D.C., as one giant fraud-riddled crime scene, one must ask how many legislators in both major parties knew about the fraud and even profited from it.

Thus, the Founders’ vision of a representative republic guided by legislators who worked for the people has not materialized.

For the time being, however, one may focus on the positive by acknowledging, first, that the major impediments to Trump’s agenda have come from the judiciary and the corrupt bureaucracy rather than from Congress, and second, that GOP legislators thus far have at least done the bare minimum that MAGA has demanded.

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