Donald Trump is so out of touch with reality that he thinks he is popular.
https://www.thenation.com/article/donald-trump-actually-thinks-hes-popular/
Donald Trump is so out of touch with reality that he thinks he is popular.
He’s not. And Americans, no matter what their partisanship, no matter what their ideology, should be worried that their president is lying not just to them but to himself.
Trump has been obsessed in recent days by a Rasmussen Reports daily presidential tracking poll that was published April 4. It put his approval rating at 51 percent. “Still Rising: Rasmussen Poll Shows Donald Trump Approval Ratings Now at 51 Percent,” Trump tweeted on Wednesday, as part of a pattern of tweets claiming that he’s experiencing a popularity surge.
Appearing Friday morning on the Trump-approving “Bernie & Sid Show” on New York’s WABC radio show—”we both think you’re doing a terrific job…”—the president claimed he was on a roll. “A poll just came out now, Rasmussen, it’s now 51,” chirped the president. “And they say that it’s 51, but add another 7 or 8 points to it. That’s somewhat embarrassing for me to tell you because they don’t want to talk about it, but when they get into the (voting) booth they’re going to vote for Trump.”
The problem with Trump’s calculus is that, the “51” number was always an outlier. And it was already collapsing.
Rasmussen, a polling firm that has consistently found higher numbers for Trump than other survey research operations, did put the president at 51 on Wednesday. But Thursday’s Rasmussen daily tracking poll had the president’s approval rating falling to 47 percent, with 51 percent of those polled expressing disapproval. On Friday, when Trump was saying “it’s now 51,” his Rasmussen approval rating was actually 47 percent, while his disapproval number had risen to 52 percent.
In other words, the survey firm that the president has been busy thanking for doing “honest polling” is telling us that his approval rating has gone down in a week that saw talk of a “trade war” with China and mounting calls for the removal of scandal-plagued Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt.
But it’s actually much worse than that for Trump. Rasmussen is just one pollster. All the rest of the recent polls from major survey research groups show Trump with a double-digit polling deficit. Some have his approval rating falling into the thirties. The Real Clear Politics average of recent polls provides the clearest picture: As of Friday morning, Trump’s approval rating was at 41.5 percent. His disapproval rating was at 54.6 percent. That’s a 13.1 percent deficit.
That’s also well below the level of support Trump got when he lost—let’s reemphasize: lost —the popular vote in 2016. In that year’s presidential race, Trump secured 46.1 percent of the vote to 48.2 percent for Democrat Hillary Clinton. Clinton received almost three million more votes than Trump, and that was after she faced an onslaught of criticism and attacks during the 2016 campaign.
Trump could never accept those numbers. He has made wild claims about voter fraud and promoted other electoral fantasies in attempts to explain his failure to appeal to the vast majority of voters. And he never acknowledges—no matter how his numbers compared with Clinton’s in the popular vote—that the overall portion of the 2016 American electorate that chose someone other than Trump for the presidency was 54 percent.
Why should Americans worry that their president keeps deceiving himself—and his fellow Republicans, in Congress and in the states where GOP-backed candidates are being rejected with growing frequency—about these approval ratings?
Because this is a president who, we are told, trusts his instincts. If Trump really believes his approach to governing is popular, if he really imagines that his popularity is “still rising,” he is more likely to keep doing what he is doing.
The fact is that Trump’s instincts are wrong, as are his policies. They are not making him more popular. He may experience temporary fluctuations in his approval ratings, but they are never great—or even all that good. In fact, when it comes to approval ratings, it certainly looks like Trump’s best days were back in November of 2016, when he was on the losing end of a 54-46 measure of popular sentiment.
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I think he's on that drug Limbaugh was addicted to.
Trump must have the most fragile ego of anyone on the planet.
He got 46.1 of the national vote in the Nov '16 election.
That is the high point of his popularity, which has steadily fallen below that since.
The depths of trump's deception is easily seen in his touting of the Rassmussen poll. It is one tracking poll out of 8 or 10 that regularly report. None of the others show him at anywhere close to 50%, but he acts like the ONE that does is the only one that matters.
He's just a constant liar, and people who say otherwise are deluded or liars themselves.
What is sad is that you think this man is qualified to be president of the United States.
That's giving him way too much credit since it's only counting the people who bothered to vote rather than the general public. Trump's actual popularity immediately after the election was only 42%, per Gallup. He's mostly hovered somewhere under 40% since then with the large majority of the public disapproving of him and his job performance. But given how gullible his base is I doubt he'll ever go much lower than 32% even after he's convicted.
I think that he is delusional or early onset Altzeimers. Did you see the unhinged speech that he gave at the White House Easter egg roll?
His rape claims yesterday were delusional.
If he won in the electoral college with 46% of the vote, then he could be re-elected with that same “popularity.” Democrats are working hard to get him re-elected with positions that piss off everybody else (e.g. sanctuary cities, transgenderism, anti-white male feminism, political correctness).
"The media is so unfair to me!!!!!"
--Donny Chump, crybaby-in-chief...
What was that you were saying about being, "PC"?
Donny is at 41.5%, via RCP, which is an average of all the polls.
Trump has only hit 46% one time and it lasted all of 3 days.