Donald Trump likes to blame the messenger for bad news, whether it’s media coverage or, increasingly, polls.
On Thursday, Trump reacted to the news of a bad poll from Fox News by… talking about how Fox should fire its pollster.
A Fox News poll released Wednesday showed Trump 11 points underwater in his approval rating, with 44 percent of respondents approving of the president’s job performance and 55 percent disapproving. It’s worse than the numbers posted by any of the other recent presidents at their 100-day mark in office, and they’re even worse than Trump’s own approval rating at the 100-day mark of his first term.
Most recent polls have shown Trump underwater in his approval rating, although the Fox poll is worse than most other recent ones.
Stay up-to-date with the latest news!
Subscribe and start recieving our daily emails.
Naturally, the president took to Truth Social to rip… the pollster.
“Rupert Murdoch has told me for years that he is going to get rid of his FoxNews, Trump Hating, Fake Pollster, but he has never done so,” Trump said of the Fox head. “This ‘pollster’ has gotten me, and MAGA, wrong for years. Also, and while he’s at it, he should start making changes at the China Loving Wall Street Journal. It sucks!!!”
Rupert Murdoch, 94 years old, is now the chairman emeritus of Fox Corporation. He has had an up-and-down relationship with Trump over the years, backing him at times and seeming to abandon him at others. Trump is believed to still be angry at Fox’s decision desk — which is separate from its polling operation — for calling Arizona for Joe Biden on election night in 2020.
This isn’t the first time Trump has gone after a pollster. He went so far as to sue Ann Selzer, the respected pollster for the Des Moines Register in Iowa, for a pre-election poll that had Kamala Harris winning in Iowa days before she lost by double digits.
There’s no doubt that Selzer got the poll wrong, but the suit implies that Selzer defrauded consumers by making that incorrect position. Selzer, at least before the 2024 miss, was likely the nation’s most respected pollster, with an impeccable record and no indications of any partisan slant. And the goal of respected pollsters like her is not to help any candidate but rather to be right.
“It is hard to imagine a legal claim that violates basic First Amendment principles more thoroughly than does President-elect Donald Trump’s lawsuit against veteran Iowa pollster J. Ann Selzer and The Des Moines Register,” FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said in support of Selzer.
Photo courtesy of the Political Tribune media library.
