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Trump boasted that his polls are “through the roof.” Fox News quickly proved him wrong.

New polling conducted by the president’s favorite cable network contains almost nothing but bad news for him.

Army v Navy
Army v Navy
Trump at the Army v. Navy football game in Philadelphia on December 14, 2019.
Elsa/Getty Images

During a White House press event on Friday, President Donald Trump insisted, without evidence, that impeachment is backfiring on Democrats.

“The polls have gone through the roof — for Trump,” he said. “I could show you numbers ... nobody has ever seen numbers like this before.”

It took less than 48 hours for the president’s favorite cable news channel to release a poll that strongly suggests he’s making stuff up.

A Fox News poll released Sunday morning shows that a majority of registered voters think Trump should be impeached (54 percent). Half of the survey’s respondents (50 percent) not only think Trump should be impeached, but that he should also be removed from office. By contrast, only 41 percent don’t think Trump should be impeached at all.

Fox News

As the above graphic indicates, those numbers haven’t significantly changed from late October. Other polls released in recent days by NPR/PBS/Marist and CBS also indicate that the country has been and continues to be close to evenly divided on impeachment. But one thing they do not show is the surge of support that Trump has been hyping as Democrats have moved toward impeaching him.

Fox News’s latest impeachment poll is far from the first they’ve conducted that has looked bad for Trump. But the disconnect between the network’s polling and its spin was evidenced in the way Fox News framed its latest poll on its website, where the top-line takeaways were “Trump job approval ticks up, views on impeachment steady” — not the jarring finding that half of voters want him removed from office.

Even though they tried to spin the numbers in the most positive light for him, Trump responded to the Fox News poll by lashing out at the network in a tweet in which he tagged the wrong Twitter account and urged the network to “Get a new pollster!”

Trump’s tweet may have been in reference to another part of the latest Fox News poll showing that if the election was held today, Joe Biden would best him by a 48 percent to 41 percent margin.

But Trump’s suggestion that the Fox News polling shouldn’t be taken seriously because they were off in 2016 is a mistaken one. The network’s final 2016 poll found Hillary Clinton leading Trump by a 4-point spread (48 percent to 44 percent) that was quite close to Clinton’s ultimately margin of victory in the popular vote (48 percent to 46 percent).

Less than 10 minutes after posting that tweet, Trump boasted his “Approval Rating in Republican Party = 95%.” It was at least the 12th time Trump cited that specific number on Twitter, without even once linking to a poll indicating he isn’t totally making it up.


The news moves fast. To stay updated, follow Aaron Rupar on Twitter, and read more of Vox’s policy and politics coverage.

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