A world without polls would be a dictator’s playground.
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Donald Trump is shocked, shocked to find himself unpopular.
Confronted with polling by just about every major polling outfit, from The New York Times to Fox News, that shows him underwater in both overall job approval and in virtually every subcategory, for the lowest 100-day presidential approval rating in 80 years, the president’s response was true to form: He’s demanded an investigation of the polls and polling firms. Which, he has concluded, are rigged against him.
Here it is in his own words, posted on Truth Social:
Great pollster John McLaughlin, one of the most highly respected in the industry, has just stated that The Failing New York Times poll, and the ABC/Washington Post poll, about a person named DONALD J. TRUMP, ME, are FAKE POLLS FROM FAKE NEWS ORGANIZATIONS.
They suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, and there is nothing that anyone, or anything, can do about it. THEY ARE SICK, almost only write negative stories about me no matter how well I am doing (99.9% at the Border, BEST NUMBER EVER!), AND ARE TRULY THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE! I wish them well, but will continue to fight to, [sic] MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
The gist of the rant: The polls are fake, the pollsters are sick (with TDS) and the enemy of the people. If anyone has any doubts, they can ask “great pollster” (who just happens to be Trump’s pollster) John McLaughlin for the skinny.
McLaughlin’s statement to Newsweek lays it right out there:
When President Trump received 50 percent of the popular vote, but The New York Times includes only 37 percent of his voters in their poll and ABC/Washington Post has only 34 percent Trump supporters, it seems that they deliberately biased their polls against President Trump.
Well that’s pretty damning, right? Trump received 50 percent of the popular vote in 2024 so any FAIR poll would reflect that basic fact by weighting its sample such that half its respondents would indicate that they had voted for Trump (i.e., were Trump supporters). Instead, to take the more extreme example cited by McLaughlin, the ABC/WaPo poll ditched a third of them, leaving only 34 percent of the poll’s respondents indicating they had voted for Trump.
UNFAIR! Of course such a biased sample would give Trump low approval numbers! FAKE POLLS! Case Closed.
Except for this little factoid. The ABC/WaPo poll states: “The poll of 2,464 U.S. adults was conducted between April 18-22.”
Take note: “U.S. adults.” Not “Likely Voters”; not “Registered Voters.” That’s because “job approval” polls are different from “who are you going to vote for” polls — in most of the former, the idea is to survey the general (adult) population.
This matters — it really matters — because Trump did not receive the votes of 50 percent of US adults in 2024. In fact, he received the votes of just under 30 percent of US adults (77.3 million out of roughly 262 million).
So if you were looking to draw a fair sample of US adults, it would include 30 percent, not 50 percent, who said they had voted for Trump. The ABC/WaPo poll had 34 percent, the Times poll 37 percent — that is, in both cases, an over-representation of Trump voters.
(The reason generally advanced for such an oversampling is that MAGAs tend to be harder to reach and more reluctant to respond so their responses have to be upweighted to produce fair and accurate results. I have studied and debated this “reluctant responder” argument in eye-glazing detail since it was first advanced regarding George W. Bush’s polling in 2004, and you can color me dubious; but we’ll pass it for the purposes of this analysis.)
Related: Polling 101: Clearing Up Some Misunderstandings
Related: Polling 202: Reason for Hope?
McLaughlin, “great pollster” that he is, knows all this of course — knows that the proportion of Trump voters in the ABC/Wapo and Times samples was, if anything, high. Knows that the polls were not biased against Trump. It’s Polling 101.
So why did he besmirch whatever professional reputation he may have by claiming “deliberate bias” and thereby fueling Trump’s “FAKE POLLS” rant and demand for investigation?
We’re now dunked deep into the post-truth swill; much of the time, fact-checkers can’t keep up with the lies, and that’s the whole idea. That’s the way a fascist regime — one that is compelled to hide from those it governs that it’s feverishly working against their interests and welfare — has to roll.
Well, I suppose one might ask him. Or one might simply observe the pattern of Trump lickspittles — from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin, and DHS Secretary Kristi Noem to press secretary Karoline Leavitt and on down through the ranks — just making stuff up to suit the president’s needs and/or massage his eggshell ego.
Did you know, for example, that yesterday Bondi publicly credited Trump with saving 258 million American lives — yes, three-quarters of the US population — by his interception of fentanyl shipments. I rest my case.
Some Things Some People Have Started To Notice
We’re now dunked deep into the post-truth swill; much of the time, fact-checkers can’t keep up with the lies, and that’s the whole idea. That’s the way a fascist regime — one that is compelled to hide from those it governs that it’s feverishly working against their interests and welfare — has to roll.
But, liars and their torrents of lies notwithstanding, there’s only so much they can do to hide the truth.
US adults (and even some kids) notice when you begin abducting and disappearing people off the street without any semblance of due process. They notice when top officials chat up war plans on their personal cell phones and then transparently lie about it. They notice when the fees are jacked up 50 percent and the senior discount eliminated at the national park they visit. They notice when they can’t get through to anyone at Social Security or Medicare or the VA or the IRS, or have to spend their day waiting in line at one of the few remaining branch offices in their area. They notice the flood of “mistakes,” the rising waves of chaos and dysfunction.
And they certainly notice when the economy shrinks for the first time since COVID-19; when their own nest eggs take a beating, in the blast radius of the “Liberation Day” tariff bomb, while a shaken Wall Street sheds $6 trillion in value; when prices remain high or get higher and dolls “cost a couple of bucks more”; when recession and inflation loom; when shelves start to empty.
Some may even notice when once-eradicated infectious diseases start making a comeback; when federal workers are fired en masse without cause; when law firms, universities, media outlets, nonprofits, and individuals are bullied with strong-arm threats worthy of a mob extortion racket; when a judge is arrested and led from her courthouse in handcuffs; when foreign aid is suddenly and cruelly cut off, and stories and images of the consequent suffering appear; when lifelong allies are threatened and betrayed, and the only global leaders left with anything good to say about our country are the dictators.
One can see how Trump’s popularity might have slipped a little from what it was when he took office back in January, claiming a sweeping and historic “mandate” when over half of those who did vote voted for someone else.
Not everyone reacts to everything, but it all starts to add up — you might be forgiven for asking what took so long. But eventually even “low-information” voters (and non-voters) begin to take note of the rot, wondering whether it’s maybe not quite what they signed on for and thought they were going to get. And that’s on top of the tens of millions of Americans who began 2025 distrusting and — it’s by no means too strong a word — hating this president.
So one can see how Trump’s popularity might have slipped a little from what it was when he took office back in January, claiming a sweeping and historic “mandate” when over half of those who did vote voted for someone else.
(And note that, even if the polls were all biased against Trump, which we know they are not, they’re using the same methodology now as they were in January so there’s zero basis for any claim that the slippage isn’t 100 percent real.)
The bottom line: On an “academic” A-to-F grading scale, in the most recent poll of its kind, conducted a week ago by Marist, 45 percent of US adults — and 49 percent of Independents — graded Trump “F”. Just 23 percent “A”, only 16 percent “A” among Independents.
That’s a pretty clear picture of an extremely polarizing figure nose-diving into very deep water.
First Let’s Shoot the Messenger
Except that if you’re Donald Trump you can’t see it. Donald Trump unpopular? Donald Trump a loser?? CAN’T HAPPEN! FAKE POLLS from FAKE NEWS ORGANIZATIONS!! WE MUST INVESTIGATE!!!
And if your job is to keep Donald Trump in high spirits — essential to his whole act and the success of the con — you can’t see it either. Or maybe you can see it and just have to lie about it: to him — “You’re killing it, sir!” — and to us. So you have the inimitable Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, telling a Fox News anchor on air that the right-wing network needs to fire its pollster.
Or perhaps Trump can see it, knows that he’s screwing Americans over, knows that they don’t like it, knows that the polls accurately reflect his failures, his overreach, the growing recognition that he is dangerous. And yet doesn’t care — is already seeing beyond the popularity game to the power game, how unpopular dictators keep their grip on the nations they rule.
Target the polls, target the media, target the courts, target your critics — get them all, one by one, to bow to you.
Then target the elections themselves — make it really hard for would-be voters who despise you to vote, and borrow still darker schemes from the playbooks of “managed democracies” like Hungary, Turkey, and of course Russia.
Meet the marchers, demonstrators, strikers with the Insurrection Act and deadly force. If all else fails, call out your hardcore MAGA worshippers with their millions of guns. Do whatever it takes to stave off your demise — it’s your opera, sing it.
We’ll find out soon enough where it all winds up. For now, keep an eye on Trump’s call for an investigation of the pollsters and their media affiliates. Is it just more baseless rhetorical bluster or will he actually follow through? He certainly has the wherewithal to do so, though what the investigators will find, if they’re honest, is likely a bit of industry-wide bias in Trump’s favor.
And what happens if the trend continues and this man who just got finished telling his Atlantic interviewers “I run the country and the world” finds himself not just underwater but drowning, in real political danger, down in the low 30s or even the 20s? How FAKE will the polls be then?
Trump and his minions have taken “creating your own reality,” a concept first articulated by Karl Rove during the heady Bush years, to a whole new level. The polls are, in spite of all their issues, just about the only consistent reality check we, as a nation, still have left. (And let’s be real: Just about all of us, including the august justices of the Supreme Court, parse them for our cues.) Without them we wouldn’t know what we, collectively, actually think. Or who we are.
We might know what our family thinks, or our friends and neighbors, even our small town or city. But — barring the results of very sporadic down-ballot special elections that, for what it’s worth, have been even more ominous for Trump than the polls — we wouldn’t have a clue about the people 100 miles away or in another state.
There would, in effect, be no reality — only what was being created for us. Only what Fox News was telling Fox News viewers, and MSNBC telling MSNBC viewers, and CNN telling CNN viewers, and all sorts of influencers telling their hordes of followers — all without any actual numbers to ground whatever story they were telling.
Such a world would be a reality-creating dictator’s playground.
Instead, the often maligned polls — powerless as they are, in and of themselves, to make policy or choose leaders — may turn out to be Donald Trump’s most fearsome enemy. And, if his over-the-top reaction to the dismal numbers is any indication, no one knows this better than Trump himself.
