Day 304: Trump Obsessed With Polls

If there’s been one constant of the last 304 days, it’s the consistent childish behavior emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Last month, Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) went so far as to call the building an adult daycare center for Donald Trump.

In the White House, like adults often do for children, staffers have tried to shield Trump from some of the more negative news surrounding his tenure.

For instance, while some presidents have monitored polls more than others, Trump has an infatuation that goes beyond the norm. As a result, the enablers around him constantly try to ply him with good information.

Adviser Jared Kushner often tells Trump not to trust traditional data, while former chief White House strategist Steve Bannon used to tell Trump to focus only on the 40 percent or so of Americans who make up his base.

Aides provide information to Trump in the rosiest possible terms, even if the data is fake news.

Yet several senior officials said they don’t trust the internal polls because they are “delusional” or “just not accurate,” in the words of two officials. The numbers Trump are shown are almost always higher than his public polling numbers. “I wouldn’t trust our polling on that,” one senior aide said, after ticking off numbers on health care earlier this year.

Trump, rarely one to do much research on his own, is actually tracking Gallup data “almost every day” and realizes just how poor of a job the country thinks he is doing. For ten months he has seen his approval rating drop in a virtually consistent manner. This has led to a one-two step of privately driving him crazy while publicly calling the data wrong.

304 days in, 1158 to go

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