Donald Trump is no stranger to discouraging poll numbers. The president ended his first term with historically low support; he started his second term on a similar note; and on the anniversary of his second inauguration, the Republican’s public backing has plunged to embarrassing depths.
As a rule, when survey data tells Trump what he doesn’t want to hear, he responds by making up a generous new approval rating for himself, while asking the public to play along and pretend it’s real. But once in a while, when the president is especially frustrated by Americans’ attitudes, he reaches out to his lawyers.
In June 2020, for example, during Trump’s re-election bid, his operation sent a cease-and-desist letter to the president of CNN, demanding that the network retract and apologize for a poll that showed him trailing Joe Biden (who, roughly four months later, defeated the Republican incumbent). CNN ignored the demand, and Trump failed to follow through on his threat to sue.
Four years later, after winning a second term, Trump filed an unprecedented lawsuit against the Des Moines Register for publishing the results of a pre-election poll that he didn’t like. Five months after that, having returned to the White House, the president responded to a series of discouraging surveys by calling pollsters “criminals” and demanding that someone (he didn’t say who) launch an “investigation” into independent polling outlets for producing data he deemed “fake.”
As 2026 gets underway, Trump is taking further steps down the same ridiculous path. After The New York Times published the results of its latest national poll, which also showed horrible results for the White House, the president published a tirade to his social media platform:
The Times Siena Poll, which is always tremendously negative to me, especially just before the Election of 2024, where I won in a Landslide, will be added to my lawsuit against The Failing New York Times. Our lawyers have demanded that they keep all Records, and how they ‘computed’ these fake results. … They will be held fully responsible for all of their Radical Left lies and wrongdoing!
The lawsuit he referred to was filed in the fall, when Trump announced that he was seeking $15 billion from The New York Times for coverage he said damaged his reputation. (It was one of several civil suits the president has filed of late against major news organizations.)
Just eight minutes after publishing his online item, he wrote a follow-up post that claimed news organizations are conspiring to hide the results of “REAL Polls,” which he insisted “have been GREAT.”
Ten minutes after that, Trump was still rolling. “Fake and Fraudulent Polling should be, virtually, a criminal offense,” he wrote online, adding, “Something has to be done about Fraudulent Polling. … I am going to do everything possible to keep this Polling SCAM from moving forward!”
No one in Republican politics has ever even attempted to produce evidence of independent news organizations having secretly conspired with pollsters to generate public opinion data that hurts the president’s feelings. The very idea — even by Trump standards — is ludicrous.
In a normal and healthy political environment, American presidents struggling with sinking public support, especially in their second term, have options: They can predict a future turnaround. They can argue that they don’t consider public opinion research to be especially important, since they can’t run for a third term anyway. They might even adopt a longer view and insist that they expect history to vindicate them.
They might even consider changing course and moving away from the policies that are dragging down their popularity.
In 2026, however, Americans are not living in a normal and healthy political environment.
