Trump's Polling Collapse, the ICE Arrest Warrant, and the Revenge Tour Lands in Kentucky

May 19, 2026

A pump at a BP gas station, April 17, 2026, Asheville, NC. (Getty Images)

1. Trump’s Gas Price Penalty

The new NYT/Siena poll is the latest evidence of Trump’s dramatic approval-rating collapse. Trump hit a second-term low of 37 percent.

Trump’s second-term trajectory is quite different from that of his first term. In this graph, his approval rating for both terms is aligned. The red line shows the second term so far, and this time it is basically a steady decline.

I would like to think the war in Iran, Trump’s many public acts of corruption, and his general contempt for democratic institutions are driving the recent slide.

But I think the simplest explanation is just gas prices.

If a foreign entanglement doesn’t produce American casualties or direct economic pain, then presidents usually do not suffer much blowback. So when people say it’s the war in Iran that’s harming Trump, what they are really talking about is the price of a gallon of gasoline—despite all the sophisticated commentary about Republicans turning against forever wars. (Nobody cared when Trump previously—and illegally—bombed Iran or snatched Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela.)

Presidential approval and gas prices are not perfectly correlated, of course. But the basic pattern is hard to miss: over the last 25 years, major gas-price spikes have done real damage to the approval ratings of Bush, Obama, Biden, and Trump.

How big is the effect? One oft-cited 2016 study estimated that a 10-cent rise in gas prices is associated with a 0.6-point drop in approval, though that relationship appears to have weakened as polarization has intensified. (Negative partisanship solves a lot of problems for modern presidents.) G. Elliott Morris recently estimated that “10% monthly jump in gas prices is associated with roughly a 1-point drop in net approval,” which he called “small potatoes.”

The key is that the spikes have to be steep to really bite—large increases over short periods. Trump’s first term is the exception that seems to prove this rule. There were no major spikes. Gas prices bounced around in a narrow band and didn’t have a noticeable impact on his approval rating.

This time is different. On the right side of the graph, it’s hard not to notice that Trump’s trajectory in his second term looks an awful lot like Biden’s. From June 2021 to June 2022, gas prices rose 64 percent, and Biden never recovered from the associated 14-point drop in his approval rating.

Under Trump, gas prices have risen 62 percent in just a few months, producing an even steeper spike than the one Biden faced. Given the history of these spikes, you would expect Trump’s approval to continue its decline in the coming weeks. The conventional wisdom about Trump’s supposedly high approval floor is about to be tested.

Either way, the bad news for Trump — and for Republicans in November — is that the political effects of gas prices are asymmetric: sharp increases drive sharp drops in approval, but sharp declines don’t produce equivalent recoveries.

2. Minneapolis Hasn’t Forgotten

You may remember that back in January, at the height of the ICE invasion of Minneapolis, Kristi Noem and her shameless DHS apparatchiks, such as Tricia McLaughlin, smeared a man named Julio Sosa-Celis after he was shot in the leg by an ICE agent.

Noem accused Sosa-Celis of “an attempted murder of federal law enforcement” and released a detailed account of his alleged actions:

As the officer was being ambushed and attacked by the two individuals, Sosa-Celis got loose and began striking the officer with a shovel or broom stick. Fearing for his life and safety as he was being ambushed by three individuals, the officer fired a defensive shot to defend his life. Sosa-Celis was hit in the leg. All three subjects ran back into the apartment and barricaded themselves inside. ICE successfully arrested all three illegal aliens.

Naturally, none of that was true.

There was no attack on the ICE officer. He actually shot into the apartment after the man he was chasing had retreated into his home. The bullet ripped through Sosa-Celis’s leg and lodged in the wall of a child’s bedroom.

Everyone inside the apartment was then pulled into a nightmare, as The Star Tribune detailed this morning:

ICE agents ultimately broke down the door and detained several people inside. Sosa-Celis and [his roommate Alfredo Alejandro] Aljorna were charged federally. Gabriel Alejandro Hernandez-Ledezma, a third man who lived in a different part of the duplex and had nothing to do with the situation, was publicly identified as attacking the officer and sent to Texas. He was detained for weeks without charges. Two women in the home, who had no criminal record and were never accused of a crime, were shackled and sent to a Texas detention facility where they remained for two weeks, separated from their two small children.

The ICE agent made up the entire story about being attacked, and the charges against Sosa-Celis, who was in the country legally, were dropped.

Yesterday, the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office issued a nationwide arrest warrant for the ICE officer, Christian J. Castro, charging him with several counts of assault with a dangerous weapon and falsely reporting a crime. The Trump administration has refused all cooperation with the Minnesota county’s investigation.

This is the second case that Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty has brought against ICE agents. She said yesterday that her office is still working on the better-known cases that led to the deadly shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, but the Trump administration has also refused to cooperate with those inquiries, even blocking access to the names of the officers who killed Pretti. (Though ProPublica has identified them as Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez.)

Given the complications of charging federal officers, the lack of public action on the Good and Pretti cases now appears more like rigor than negligence. Moriarty told reporters yesterday, “The last thing we want to do is make a mistake if we feel something is appropriately charged and get dismissed out of federal court.”

3. The Real Story of Trump’s Revenge Tour

Sen. Bill Cassidy, who was defeated by a Trump-endorsed opponent in a Louisiana primary on Saturday, was back on the Hill Monday and said he had no regrets.

“When I die, if that’s put in my obituary—‘He voted to uphold the Constitution’—that’s going to be a better obituary,” he told reporters. “[The impeachment vote] may have cost me my seat, but who cares?”

Cassidy was one of seven Republican senators who voted to convict Trump at his 2021 impeachment trial, and now only Sens. Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski have viable political futures.

The other Republican yes votes came from Sens. Richard Burr (NC), Ben Sasse (NE), Mitt Romney (UT), and Pat Toomey (PA), who all retired after sustained political harassment from Trump and his MAGA allies.

The broad trend in Congress over the last decade, especially in the House, has been for anti-Trump Republicans to be replaced by reliable MAGA politicians. But the history of the seven Republican senators who stood up to Trump is more nuanced than the usual revenge-tour narrative suggests.

Burr and Sasse were indeed replaced by reliable Trump supporters. But Murkowski survived a 2022 attempt by Trump to oust her. As for Toomey, Republicans lost his seat to a Democrat (at least for now!). Romney’s replacement, Sen. John Curtis, didn’t support Trump in the 2024 primary, has broken with him on tariffs, Ukraine, and climate, and was a crucial vote to help oust Matt Gaetz as a possible attorney general. Collins has continued to be very Collinsy about Trump, but she may end up losing her seat to a Democrat.

Cassidy is the only one of the seven whom Trump can claim as a clear victory in his five-year revenge campaign against senators who did the right thing after the Capitol was sacked.

Today in Kentucky, Rep. Thomas Massie will be the latest Republican to test the power of Trumpian vengeance. Polls close at 6 PM local time in Kentucky. (So 7 PM ET for the western counties of the state.)

Ben Jacobs has a fun piece on Massie from Kentucky.

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?