Day 686: Trump still obsessed with and lying about poll numbers
If there’s one thing Donald Trump can’t quit, it’s obsessing about his poll numbers. Previous reports have indicate that he likes to review them nearly every day.
He also likes to publicly comment on his approval ratings, twisting middling — at best — numbers into victories. That trend continued just hours after he attended George H.W. Bush’s funeral.
His tweet is rife with errors, even excluding the laughable grammatical mistakes and ignoring the fact that he just says “military” and “vets” every opportunity he gets, even when there’s no context or such nouns make no sense.
Importantly, Rasmussen is among the least accurate major pollsters. They lean heavily conservative and even predicted a narrow win by Republicans in the popular vote just before the 2018 midterms.
They were wrong by 10 million votes, off as Democrats celebrated historic margins.
Rasmussen could only find that half the country approves Trump’s job performance. In actuality, blending major polls, Trump’s approval rating hovers around 42 percent. At no point in Trump’s presidency has he been more popular than Barack Obama was at the same point in his. Trump has topped most recent predecessors for just a few days, if at all. In short: he’s wildly unpopular now and compared to his peers.
Trump’s tweet is also farcical because his approval rating would never come close to 75 percent. George W. Bush reached that peak immediately after 9/11, but that number steadily fell. George H.W. Bush reached that figure occasionally, but support dropped as well and he was still a one-term president. Most modern presidents have no chance to get close to such a number, especially in such a partisan environment.
In addition to the current political climate, Trump, who lost the popular vote by 3 million votes, has historic vitriol against him unrelated to the Robert Mueller probe. (Mueller, by the way, enjoys a net approval rating far better than Trump.) Trump knows that his approval rating is unlikely to rise substantially under nearly any circumstance, and he knows his unpopularity has little or nothing to do with Mueller.
But Trump can’t publicly accept that most Americans disapprove of him and his job performance. So he’s forced to cherry-pick the best possible poll numbers he can find— embarrassingly low as they may be — and then give an excuse as to why they aren’t a staggering 25 percentage points higher.
686 days in, 776 to go
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