Donald Trump is once again talking up his own popularity — but the numbers tell a very different story.
The 79-year-old president spent part of this week lamenting that he can’t run for a third term, claiming the Constitution is the only thing stopping him from another victory. But then he took it a step further, boasting that he’s never been more beloved by the American public. That’s when CNN’s fact-checkers stepped in — and the takedown was brutal.
According to CNN’s Daniel Dale, Trump “said two things about his popularity that are not even close to true.”
“He said, ‘I have my highest poll numbers that I’ve ever had.’ And he said, ‘I have the best numbers for any president in many years – any president,’” Dale wrote. “In reality, polls show that Americans’ approval of Trump has declined significantly since the beginning of his second term in late January. Multiple polling averages confirm that Trump’s poll numbers are nowhere in the ballpark of their highest-ever levels.”
As of Tuesday, a New York Times average put Trump’s approval rating at 43 percent, with 54 percent disapproval — a minus-11 net approval. That’s a 20-point nosedive from the first week of his second term, when he sat comfortably at plus-9 (52 percent approval and 43 percent disapproval).
And that’s not an outlier. CNN’s “Poll of Polls” average, updated Wednesday, shows Trump’s net approval even lower, at negative-15 points (41 percent approval and 56 percent disapproval). “Down a net 14 points from our first average of the term in early February,” Dale noted.
Other polling experts found the same pattern. G. Elliott Morris, co-founder of the polling site FiftyPlusOne.news, pegged Trump’s net approval at negative-14 points, down about 26 points since January. Data journalist Nate Silver’s tracking had Trump at negative-10 points, down roughly 22 points over the same period.
So much for “the best numbers for any president.”
To be fair, Trump’s support within the Republican Party remains sky-high — often in the 90s — but Dale pointed out that Trump never said he was talking about GOP voters. Nationally, his numbers don’t come close to matching past presidents.
“Trump’s current low standing – a negative net approval, with approval specifically in the low-40s – clearly does not approach the approval peaks of recent predecessors,” Dale wrote. “President Barack Obama hit 69 percent approval in the early days of his first term, according to tracking by polling firm Gallup, while President George W. Bush hit 90 percent approval in the wake of the terror attacks of September 11, 2001.”
Even President Joe Biden, who’s had his fair share of polling slumps, was “up at 57% approval in both January 2021 and April 2021,” Dale said.
In fact, Dale found that every president elected after World War II had higher approval than Trump at the same point in their first term. “The data shows that every other person elected president after World War II had better poll numbers than Trump on the equivalent date in their first term, in both net approval and approval alone,” he wrote.
And the historical comparison is devastating. Silver’s data shows that when Trump sat at negative-10, Obama had +9, George W. Bush +76, Bill Clinton +2, George H.W. Bush +38, Ronald Reagan +20, Jimmy Carter +24, Richard Nixon +27, John F. Kennedy +65, Dwight Eisenhower +45, and Harry Truman +41.
Trump supporters may still cheer him on, but the data doesn’t lie — his “record popularity” exists only in his head.
