President Donald Trump's claims about his own popularity got hit by a brutal CNN fact check Friday.
The 79-year-old president lamented this week that he is constitutionally prohibited from running for a third term, which is indeed correct, but CNN fact checker Daniel Dale ran roughshod over his assertions about his poll numbers, saying he "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."
Trump's net approval sagged to minus-11 as of Tuesday in a New York Times average, with 43 percent approval and 54 percent disapproval, which is down a staggering 20 points from the first week of his term, when he enjoyed a plus-9 point approval rating – 52 percent approval and 43 percent disapproval – and other polls show similar findings.
"CNN’s Poll of Polls average, updated Wednesday, has Trump’s net approval 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 wrote. "An average produced by G. Elliott Morris, co-founder of the polling data website FiftyPlusOne.news, put Trump’s net approval at roughly negative-14 points as of Tuesday, down about a net 26 points from the first days of the term. An average produced by data journalist Nate Silver put Trump’s net approval at roughly negative-10 points as of Tuesday, down about a net 22 points from the first days of the term."
The president does continue to bask in extremely highapproval among Republicans – often in the 90s – but Dale pointed out that he did not specify Tuesday that he was talking about intraparty popularity, and the president's poll numbers don't come anywhere near to being “the best numbers for any president in many years."
"Trump’s current low standing – a negative net approval, with approval specifically in the low-40s – clearly does not approach the approval peaksof recent predecessors. 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," Dale wrote. "Even President Joe Biden, who struggled with weak poll numbers for much of his term, was up at 57% approval in both January 2021 and April 2021."
Biden actually had a fairly low approval rating on the equivalent day of his first term, Dale wrote, but it was still better than Trump’s in both Morris’s average and Silver’s average, and he found no evidence that his popularity was higher than “any president in many years."
"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," Dale wrote.
"Silver’s historical tracking shows that, on the date Trump made this claim while having a roughly negative-10 net approval, Obama had about a positive-9 net approval in his first term, George W. Bush about positive-76, President Bill Clinton positive-2, President George H.W. Bush about positive-38, President Ronald Reagan about positive-20, President Jimmy Carter about positive-24, President Richard Nixon about positive-27, President John F. Kennedy about positive-65, President Dwight D. Eisenhower about positive-45, and President Harry Truman about positive-41."