Donald Trump hates getting crushed in the polls. His campaign says that's all part of the plan.

Donald Trump is surprised he&#039;s losing in the polls.

(Image credit: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

published 4 August 2016

Immediately after the GOP convention, Donald Trump surged in the polls to a 6-point lead over Hillary Clinton. That bump quickly evaporated, and since then Clinton has stayed well ahead.

The Trump campaign insists that's totally fine. In fact, campaign chairman Paul Manafort said Thursday, this "drop in poll numbers" was "expected." Be chill, guys.

But Trump himself did not get that memo. Speaking at a rally in Florida on Wednesday night, he mused on the contrast between the size of his event crowds on the one hand — "We go to Oklahoma, we had 25,000 people. We had 21,000 people in Dallas. We had 35,000 people in Mobile, Alabama" — and the weakness of his poll numbers on the other.

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"I don't know why we're not leading by a lot," Trump plaintively concluded. "Maybe crowds don't make the difference." Maybe, indeed.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.