Trump Is Playing a Polling Trick on Himself

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Tuesday, March 31, 2026

 

‘They did a poll,” President Trump told the viewers of The Five last week: “‘Is Trump losing MAGA support?’ The poll was 100 percent. It was 100 percent of the people — the MAGA people.”

 

As is his wont, Trump flitted seamlessly between those two groups: First, “the people,” and then, “the MAGA people” — the latter of which, he suggested, may as well be a synonym for “the whole Republican Party.” “I think I’m more popular than I ever have been,” he said, before claiming that he would be “leading every candidate” if he were permitted to run again in 2028. “We’re very popular. I mean, what can I say?”

 

Insofar as Trump is pushing back against the evidently incorrect claim that his foray into Iran has prompted his base to abandon him, his boasts are on solid ground. But he did not stop there. Instead, he berated as “fake” the polling that shows him at “42 percent” and claimed to have attracted a general level of acclaim that “bad” actors in the media — including Fox’s own polling department — refused to acknowledge. Critics of his, Trump insisted, “use fake numbers” and promulgate bad information that does “damage” to the nation and its denizens.

 

Which, in this case, is not really true, is it? Certainly, Trump remains popular with his base. But, in the sixth year of his presidency, that’s not a particularly useful metric. In the United States, elections are won — and, more important, agendas are advanced — with the support of the middle. And, at present, the middle does not like Donald Trump at all. With the middle, Trump is underwater on the economy, on immigration, on foreign policy, and on pretty much everything else. Pace Trump, if a presidential election were held today, he would not “lead every candidate”; he would be beaten badly by almost anyone. Heck, he might even lose to Joe Biden.

 

Why does this matter? Well, it matters because, once again, we are watching a president overinterpret his victory and focus on the wrong things. Because he is a brazen narcissist, Trump’s conflation of himself and his fans with the country at large is more explicit than usual: Without any attempt to hide what he is doing, he points to his approval rating among the Americans he likes and then denies that anyone disagrees. But, in kind, the habit is not unique in the modern age. Joe Biden destroyed his own presidency early on by allowing himself to be persuaded that, secretly, all voters agreed with his preferred policies but that some were just too stubborn or myopic or propagandized to acknowledge it. (That, invariably, is what Democrats mean when they say that they intend to govern for all Americans but then do exactly what the most vocal figures within the progressive movement ask them to do.) Whether conjured by Republicans or Democrats, this is a neat trick: First, you define your faction as being the sensible one; next, you declare that the public is sensible; and, hey presto, your faction and the public are as one.

 

There is just one small problem with that approach: It is absolute nonsense. The divisions in American life are real, because, like all peoples, Americans genuinely disagree with one another about politics. Naturally, there are times in which our political leaders must advance their narrow ideological plans, and there are times in which they must make hard decisions that alienate some, or most, of the electorate. But if they do this too much, they will lose the support of all but their groupies, and their national influence will dwindle. It is nothing short of remarkable that, for nearly two decades now, no president has been willing even to attempt translating his victory into a more durable political movement. Joe Biden won as a moderate in 2020, and then set about spending trillions of inflation-causing dollars on Democratic pet projects, trying to forgive half a trillion dollars’ worth of loans without Congress, and recruiting the Department of Justice to advance bizarre theories about gender on the national stage. In 2024, Donald Trump was returned to office in large part because of those mistakes, and, having been sworn in, almost immediately embarked upon a wildly unpopular tariff agenda from which he has never really recovered. Does nobody want to win in politics anymore?

 

The moment is fraught. Inflation has not yet abated. Interest rates, while about normal historically, are higher than they have been for 20 years. Housing is expensive. And the war in Iran has pushed gas prices up and the stock market down. Although he will be blamed for it all — and not too unjustly, given his ugly tendency to cast himself as a savior — not all of this is Donald Trump’s fault. Still, with the midterms approaching, he is duty-bound to try to improve his lot — and that will prove impossible indeed if, when using the bully pulpit, he can see only a third of the country at best.