Trump blames the 'witch hunt' for his bad poll numbers

President Trump was apparently thinking about his poll numbers on Wednesday morning, and he wasn't happy.

Sixty-five percent isn't out of the realm of possibility for most presidents, but Trump has never risen above 46 percent in Gallup's tracking poll (he's now at 42 percent). It isn't clear what Trump hoped to accomplish with this tweet, which appears to say a quarter of the electorate is either gullible or stupid, and Trump doesn't say which polls he's objecting to, though several fit the bill.

Trump's poll numbers had been improving on good economic news and after the release of Special Counsel Robert Mueller's report, Ed Kilgore notes at New York, but now he's back to the low 40s, "very near where he's usually been, with somewhat more frequent and recent dips into the high 30s." Trump's RealClearPolitics approval average on Wednesday was 42.7 percent, and FiveThirtyEight pegged his approval at 41.2.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

A CBS News poll released Wednesday notched Trump's approval rating at a moderately high 41 percent, but a Quinnipiac poll released Tuesday put Trump 19 points under water, with 38 percent of voters approving and 57 percent disapproving. And as Harry Enten pointed out on CNN Wednesday morning, 54 percent of voters in that poll said they would definitely vote against Trump in 2020, putting him in an unwanted league of his own.

In the CBS News poll, 71 percent of Americans say the economy is good, and 50 percent of them approve of Trump's handling of the economy, his highest number. His numbers on everything else — trade, foreign policy, immigration — are considerably worse. It's hard to blame that on the "Witch Hunt."