last month

WASHINGTON — With the Iran war in its fifth week, support for President Trump is at its lowest point ever, with a growing body of recent polling showing him losing ground with key voting blocs that helped power his 2024 victory.

While public dissatisfaction is evident among many groups surveyed, the decline in support for the president has been most pronounced among Latino voters.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll released March 24 found 36% of voters approve of the president’s job performance, the lowest it has been during his second term. The poll found 62% disapproved.

Other polls, such as the AP-NORC poll, placed the figure at 38%.

In all, the president is underwater on almost every single public policy issue. With the exception of crime, which sits around 47% approval, he has recorded no gains in any polled category, according to experts.

On immigration, the president’s marquee issue, approval fell from roughly 45% in late 2025 to 39% in February, according to Reuters.

About 1 in 4 respondents approved of Trump’s handling of the economy, Reuters found, as domestic gas prices surged by more than $1 per gallon after fighting commenced last month. The share of Republicans who disapprove of his handling of cost-of-living issues rose 7 points in one week to 34%.

The shift comes amid growing economic unease and amplified backlash over the war in Iran. About 1 in 3 Americans approve of the military operation, according to a Reuters survey.

And a growing divide among prominent conservatives has emerged over the U.S. involvement in the Middle East.

The clashes have played out in public and are exposing tensions within the Republican Party, with conservative commentators such as Megyn Kelly openly questioning whether the war is in America’s best interest.

“This is not a foreign policy that makes sense and it is not what Trump ran on. It is, in many ways, a betrayal of his campaign promises, what he sold himself as and of his MAGA base,” Kelly said earlier this month.

Other conservative pundits, including Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, are also opposed.

But the real damage is showing up in the one place Trump can’t afford to lose: his base.

Trump entered his second term buoyed by historic gains with Latino voters. Exit polls indicated he improved his standing with them by more than 20 percentage points in 2024 compared with his 2016 victory, fueling widespread narratives that the demographic was undergoing a durable shift toward Republicans. In all, 48% of Latinos gave him their support in the last election.

Since then, his approval among Latino voters has plummeted to 22%, according to a March 2026 analysis by the Economist.

In a bipartisan poll by UnidosUS released in November, 14% of Latino voters said their lives were better after Trump took office, while 39% said they had gotten worse.

The president’s rapport with Latinos reflects a deep dissatisfaction with economic conditions, according to Mike Madrid, a veteran California Republican political consultant and expert on Latino voting trends.

“Overwhelmingly, this is a function of the economy and affordability,” he said. “Latino voters moved away from Biden-Harris for the exact same reasons that they’re moving away from Donald Trump right now.”

Research and polling suggests Latino voters prioritize cost-of-living issues — such as housing, wages and inflation — over immigration, a topic often emphasized in national messaging.

“It’s not even close,” Madrid said. “Immigration is not even a top 5 issue for Latino voters.”

Madrid suggested the demographic rallying is less a “reversion” and more a reflection of a rapidly changing electorate.

“Latinos have emerged as the only true swing vote in America,” he said. “And they’re rejecting whichever party is in power.”

These volatile, double-digit voting shifts directly contrast more stable voting patterns among other major demographic groups, including the Black and white electorates, where shifts from cycle to cycle tend to be just a few points.

The reason: dramatic turnout fluctuations. Who decides to show out or stay home on election day tends to change by the year. It’s compounded by the fact that there are far more first-time Latino voters than in any other category.

Polling this month suggests Trump is also losing ground among young voters, another group that contributed to his 2024 gains.

More than half of men under the age of 30 supported Trump in that election, helping him turn several swing states.

In just a year, that demographic has cratered by 20 points.

“Trump won in 2024 because of men. They are abandoning him right now,” CNN senior data analyst Harry Enten said Tuesday.

The reversals could have massive implications for the November midterm elections, particularly in competitive congressional districts where small swings could determine control of the House.

Republicans have warned that if they lose hold of their narrow congressional majority, Trump is likely to face a third impeachment.

UCLA political scientist Matt Barreto said movement away from Republicans is already visible in real-world election outcomes, not just polling.

“We’ve already seen in the Virginia and New Jersey legislative and gubernatorial elections really large shifts in the Latino vote, 25 points back to the Democratic Party,” Barreto said. He added that similar patterns have emerged in places such as Miami and Texas, where Democratic candidates have outperformed expectations with strong Latino support.

Latino Democrats who sat out the 2024 election are returning to the electorate, while some Latino Republicans are disengaging, he said.

That dynamic could prove decisive in November. There are more than 40 congressional districts where the number of registered Latino voters exceeds the margin of victory in 2024, Barreto said. Many of them are closely divided between the parties.

“At the district level, the Latino vote is going to make a huge impact,” he said.

Democratic lawmakers are demanding scrutiny into Paramount Skydance’s financial backers amid rising concerns about potential foreign influence of U.S. media properties.

In a letter this week to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr, seven U.S. senators criticized Carr’s suggestion that Paramount’s $111-billion bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, backed by billionaire Larry Ellison and his family, was on a fast track to receive FCC approval with scant oversight.

Such complicated mergers typically receive an intense government review. The proposed merger would combine two legendary film studios, dozens of cable channels, HBO, CBS and two major news organizations, CNN and CBS News.

Ellison and his son, David, who chairs Paramount, are friendly with President Trump, who has long agitated for changes at CNN, which is slated to be absorbed by Paramount.

The company has said it expects to complete the deal by the end of September.

The Democrats expressed concerns that the fix may be in. Trump’s Justice Department has been reviewing whether the merger would violate U.S. antitrust laws, but a key deadline passed last month without comment from the department’s antitrust regulators.

Also at issue is the Middle Eastern money the Ellison family has been expecting to pull off Paramount’s leveraged buyout of its larger entertainment company rival. The acquisition would leave the combined company with nearly $80 billion in debt.

Late last year, Paramount disclosed that it had lined up $24 billion from wealth funds representing the royal families of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Abu Dhabi, who would then become equity partners in the combined company.

Paramount has described the funds as largely passive investors, saying the royal families would not have input into corporate decision-making. They also would not control seats on the Paramount-Warner board.

Congressional Democrats previously have warned about potential national security concerns. The senators, led by Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), remain concerned, particularly because the transaction will help shape the future of Hollywood production and the direction of key news outlets, including CNN, which maintains a strong presence around the world.

Members of the party have called on Carr to conduct “a full and independent” analysis of the foreign ownership interests before signing off on the merger. The FCC could play an important role, they said, because the tie-up includes Paramount-owned CBS, which holds FCC broadcast station licenses.

Paramount declined to comment. FCC officials did not respond to a request for comment.

Booker and Schumer pointed to Carr’s comments at an industry conference in Spain earlier this month. During an appearance at the Mobile World Congress, Carr suggested the Paramount-Warner deal could be swiftly approved because the foreign investment would warrant only a “very quick, almost pro forma review,” Carr reportedly said.

The FCC has a duty to examine foreign ownership, the lawmakers said, referencing the U.S. Communications Act, which forbids owners from outside the U.S. from holding more than 25% of the equity or voting interests in an entity that maintains an FCC license.

The lawmakers mentioned the FCC’s move earlier this year to tighten its foreign ownership framework to bolster transparency.

Paramount has not yet disclosed its final list of equity partners.

The company previously disclosed its proposed partners in Securities & Exchange Commission filings. However, last month, the composition of the Paramount-Warner deal changed when Larry Ellison agreed to fully guarantee the $45.7-billion in equity needed to finance the $31-a-share buyout of Warner investors.

Before Ellison stepped up, Warner board members had expressed concerns about Paramount’s financing. The tech billionaire’s increased involvement helped carry the Paramount deal over the finish line. Netflix bowed out Feb. 26, ceding the prize to Paramount.

Still, Paramount is expected to line up billions of dollars from outside investors.

It would be significant if Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, the Qatar Investment Authority and Abu Dhabi’s L’imad Holding Co., contributed $24 billion to the deal, the Democrats wrote.

“This is not incidental capital, it represents roughly one-fifth of the total transaction value,” Booker and the others wrote. “And it is not clear that this will be the only foreign investment.”

Initially, Paramount included Chinese technology company Tencent Holdings as a minority investor, but Paramount later removed Tencent from the investor pool due to concerns about its problematic status — it has been blacklisted by the U.S. Department of Defense.

Bloomberg News reported earlier this month that Tencent might return to the fold.

“This constellation of foreign investment from China and from Gulf States, with complex and sometimes competing relationships with the United States, demands rigorous, not perfunctory review,” Booker and the others wrote.

The letter also was signed by Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Mazie K. Hirono (D-Hawaii).

They keyed in on the role of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund, saying it was controlled by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman “whom the U.S. intelligence community concluded ordered the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.”

The proposed $24-billion investment would give “these governments a significant financial stake in the future content, licensing, and strategic decisions of a combined entity that includes some of the most-watched news and entertainment networks in America.”

It is also unclear whether the current tensions in the Middle East over the Iran war will have an impact on Paramount’s investor syndicate.

Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, a proposed Paramount investor, also withdrew late last year.

Paramount shares held steady at $9.17. The company’s stock is down 31% since Feb. 27, when the company prevailed in the Warner auction.

Angelo Gasca, a one-of-a-kind high school football coach who grew up using football to escape from gangs and became a beloved special education teacher, mentor and coach for 36 years at Venice High, died Monday night while watching a Lakers game on television, according to longtime friend, Steve Clarkson. He was 65.

The 1978 Venice graduate never left his neighborhood. Gasca won his first and only City Section Division I championship in 2021. He was known for his innovative passing schemes and producing numerous top City Section quarterbacks, led by former NFL player JP Losman. He was such a fixture at Venice that coaching sons of former players became the norm. He loved the concept of “neighborhood team.”

Perhaps his most important contribution was training, supporting and preparing players to become teachers and coaches. Most of his staff at Venice has been made up of former players. He’d help them stick with the difficult task of earning a teaching credential and find jobs for them.

He was most proud of former running back Byron Ellis, who became an orthopedic surgeon, and receiver Brycen Tremayne, who walked on at Stanford, went undrafted and made the Carolina Panthers.

Last month, Gasca was asked if he ever learned anything from a player and he told the story of having a coaches meeting and one of his ex-players reminded him how he wanted to quit football but Gasca wouldn’t let him.

“I’m not accepting your resignation today,” Gasca told him. “You need to go home and think about it.”

Said Gasca: “He went home and thought about it and stayed on the team and was the starting center. He taught me the best thing we can teach kids is come to school and you never know what connections you’ll make at the school you grew up at. He taught me there’s more to coaching than winning games and scoring touchdowns. In our lives as teachers and coaches, we do learn from players. When we stop learning, it’s time to stop coaching.”

Even though there were rumors last season of Gasca retiring, he insisted he was coming back because he loved teaching and coaching and believed that sports competition can change someone’s life for the better.

“My parents didn’t attend high school,” he said. “When you play, you get a little taste of success and want to play harder and people come into your life and help you. It’s just as easy to do well as it is to do bad. Sometimes when your friends zig right, you have to zig left. The life lessons we learn together is what it’s about.”