President Donald Trump on Thursday claimed to be more popular than at any point in his decade-long political career despite multiple recent polls showing he has never been more unpopular with American voters.
The president made the outrageous boast during a meandering, stem-winding interview with Fox News’s The Five, not long after he extended a deadline for talks with Iran in a Truth Social post.
He referenced a recent CNN poll showing he had 100 percent approval within the “MAGA” faction of the Republican Party and claimed his movement represented the entirety of the party before launching into a diatribe about the well-regarded Fox News poll, the most recent of which showed 59 percent of Americans disapprove of his performance as commander in chief.
“I hate Fox polls. Honestly, whoever does your polls are terrible. Rupert Murdoch has promised me for years he’s going to get rid of your pollster, but he doesn’t do it. I don’t get it, but your Fox polls are terrible,” he said.
The president then claimed that “pollsters that are good” currently show him “leading by a lot and leading every candidate” in a hypothetical 2028 presidential race, though he admitted that he can’t legally run for a third term.
“I would love to run — some things you can’t do in life, I guess … but we’re very popular,” Trump added.
The president continued veering from topic to topic during the softball interview before returning to the subject of the CNN poll which showed him with unanimous support within the MAGA faction of his party after claiming that the U.S. does not need the Strait of Hormuz to be re-opened because the country is a net oil exporter.
“We don’t need it, but I think I’m more popular than I ever have been,” he said.
In fact, Trump is hardly popular at all with most voters amid the sky-high gas prices and massive lines at airports that have resulted from his war in Iran and the month-long shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security.
The Fox poll also found a record low number of Republicans voicing approval of the president at 84 percent, down from 92 percent last month, with 16 percent disapproving.
The 59 percent disapproval rating recorded by the Fox News survey is alsa a low for the president’s second term, with just 41 percent of respondents on board with his agenda, a far cry from the 49 percent in favor and 51 percent against he recorded in Fox’s poll almost exactly a year ago.
Respondents also expressed significant unease with Trump’s conduct of foreign policy, with 62 percent saying they disapprove of his handling of foreign affairs, and 64 percent disapproving of his Iran policy specifically.
Another poll released by Reuters last week put the president’s approval rating even lower at 36 percent, while an Associated Press/NORC poll released on Thursday found six in ten American say the war against Iran he started alongside Israel last month has gone too far, while supermajorities of Americans oppose putting American troops on the ground there.
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