Trump 'growing increasingly unnerved' as he rages against allies over polls that show him losing to Joe Biden

President Donald Trump is infamous for having a kill-the-messenger mentality and lashing out at allies who deliver factual information he doesn’t like. And recently, the president has, according to media reports, been lashing out at his own allies for warning him about polls that show him losing to former Vice President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential race.

Thursday morning on CNN’s “New Day,” reporter Jeremy Diamond told host John Berman that Trump was especially furious when, last week, his allies mentioned polls that showed him losing to Biden in key battleground states such as Florida and Pennsylvania.

Diamond told Berman, “President Trump is growing increasingly unnerved about his prospect for re-election, particularly in the last week as he’s gotten updates from campaign and RNC officials showing he’s losing in key battleground states to the former vice president, Joe Biden.”

One of the people Trump has been lashing out at, according to media reports, is his campaign manager, Brad Parscale — who is trying to help Trump by sounding the alarm that Biden is outperforming him in polls. But Trump, true to form, not only resents bad news, but also, those who deliver it to him. And Trump is angry over internal polling from his own campaign as well as polls conducted by professional pollsters.

“The president has insisted repeatedly during his conference calls, one source familiar with these calls has told me, that he is not going to lose to Joe Biden,” Diamond told Berman. “‘I’m not losing to Joe Biden,’ is what the president has explained at different points during these conversations.”

The Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey reports that according to two sources, Trump “berated Parscale over the polling data” during a phone conservation and even threatened to file a lawsuit against him — although one of the sources told the Post that Trump was speaking in jest about suing Parscale.

Dawsey reports that in addition to lambasting his allies over polls, Trump was “angry about coronavirus testing, telling advisers that he was unfairly getting crushed in the media over shortages in the United States. Trump, this week, announced a set of testing guidelines that continued to leave the onus on states to develop their own plans.”

Polls conducted in late April showed Trump losing to Biden by 6% (Emerson and The Economist/YouGov) or 10% (USA Today/Suffolk). Recent Fox News polls have shown Trump losing to Biden by 3% in Florida, 8% in Pennsylvania and 8% in Michigan.