The president of the United States has issued a new decree about what qualifies as “fake news.”
President Donald Trump on Monday morning pronounced, falsely, that “any negative polls are fake news.” He also incorrectly implied that all election polls were fake because most put his Democratic challenger, Hillary Clinton, in the lead.
Any negative polls are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election. Sorry, people want border security and extreme vetting.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 6, 2017
Trump’s comment comes just minutes after CNN aired a segment on its recent opinion poll, released Sunday, which found Trump has a 44 percent approval—the lowest since polls like this existed in the United States.
6:30am: CNN (which Trump never watches) reports new low approval numbers
7:01am: Trump tweets polls are “fake news”https://t.co/lzFObEN8Wg
— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) February 6, 2017
The CNN/ORC poll also found Americans largely split over Trump’s controversial travel ban, which suspended the U.S. refugee program and barred citizens from seven Muslim-majority nations from entering the U.S. Some 47 percent approve of the ban while 53 percent oppose it.
A federal judge in Washington state on Friday evening temporarily shut down Trump’s executive order.
The president has repeatedly attempted to cast polls that find his approval rating at historic lows as false by pointing to his election victory as proof. In fact, while prediction models failed to foresee Trump’s victory in the Electoral College, the total average of national 2016 presidential election polls precisely aligned with Trump’s loss of the national popular vote to Clinton by 2.1 percent.
Trump’s latest effort to delegitimize polling follows a weekend during which he called U.S. District Court Judge James Robart, the President George W. Bush appointee who put a stop to the president’s travel ban, as a “so-called” judge and implicitly blamed him for putting the U.S. “in peril.”
Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 5, 2017
I have instructed Homeland Security to check people coming into our country VERY CAREFULLY. The courts are making the job very difficult!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 5, 2017
The Trump administration is currently appealing Robart’s decision. Attorneys for Washington state and Minnesota on Monday told the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco that overturning Robart’s ruling would “unleash chaos.”
