Less than a year into President Donald Trump's second term, the Trump administration is increasingly finding a bulk of the American public disapproves of its policies. One solution appears to be countering those polls with skewed results of its own.
In a Thursday analysis for MS NOW, data journalist Philip Bump argued that the administration may be "creating its own reality" in order to distract from embarrassing polls that continue to show increasing numbers of Americans disapproving of Trump's leadership. Bump cited a recent Truth Social post from Trump showing that 91 percent of Americans credit the Trump administration for a decrease in gas prices since his second term began.
However, as Bump observed, the poll was from a "White House email survey," meaning that the vast majority of respondents are likely already firmly in Trump's camp. He also reminded readers that gas prices are merely one cost among many Americans regularly pay.
"Just in case this isn’t obvious to all, this survey is not a reliable measure of public opinion," Bump wrote. "There’s no indication that anyone besides Trump supporters received that email, the question itself seems to assume that a noticeable drop occurred, and even if the finding is reliable, this is just one segment of spending and the economy."
The MS NOW journalist noted that partisan polls meant to advance a specific narrative is a pattern from Trump's first administration: In the aftermath of his 2017 tax cuts (which overwhelmingly benefited the wealthiest Americans) a CNBC survey found that most Americans hadn't seen a difference in their take-home pay a year after they went into effect. However, two-thirds of Republican respondents said they had.
Trump's White House has similarly attempted to muddy the waters in the past concerning issues that taint the president's public image. Following the revelation that Russia interfered ion the 2016 election to help Trump and hurt Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, Trump's attorney general at the time, William Barr appointed Department of Justice special counsel John Durham to launch a probe looking into potential crimes committed in the Russia investigation. But Durham's probe came up empty-handed, finding that no actual crimes occurred during the inquiry into Russian election interference.
Bump asserted that Trump may in fact be purposefully pumping out unreliable polling as a means of persuading Americans to be less trusting of any data at all, in order to undermine surveys that embarrass the administration.
"[T]he dubiousness and dishonesty is whitewashed by the fact that it comes from federal institutions," he wrote. "Surely the head of the national intelligence community wouldn’t simply invent claims and present them to the public? Surely the office of the president wouldn’t try to create good news where none existed?"
"Surely not, except that the president who appointed the requisite intelligence officials is Donald Trump, who very much would do those things," he added, "And just as Trump made the Republican Party into an appendage of his own whims, he would absolutely do the same thing with the United States government itself."
Click here to read Bump's analysis for MS NOW in its entirety.