U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during an event at The Villages Charter School at The Villages, Florida, U.S., May 1, 2026. REUTERS_Nathan Howard
Sports broadcaster and President Donald Trump supporter Stephen A. Smith thinks highly of the president and often defends him in interviews, but even Smith’s fond account of a recent dinner with Trump laid out the bubble of ignorance of ignorance surrounding Trump.
Mediaite reports Smith “spilled the tea on his dinner with President Donald Trump,” telling CNN’s Laura Coates about thing he found most shocking about a meal he shared with Trump and entertainers Kid Rock and Bill Maher.
Speaking Friday night on Laura Coates Live, Smith said Trump knows Republicans will likely lose the House and possibly the Senate in the midterms, but he also recounted that Trump was convinced he could reverse the damage by putting his face out on the campaign trail, rallying voters.
“He was saying ‘I’m going to campaign. I’m going to go all over this country and help whoever I have to help and do whatever I have to do because the people love me,’” Smith recounted. “I said ‘sir, the polls show you to be in the 30 percentile in terms of popularity.”
But Trump disavowed the legion of polls saying as much, according to Smith.
“He said ‘did you know that 99 percent of Republicans actually approve of me? So the people out there that are conservatives, that are Republicans, they love me, I love them. They will vote the way that I want them to vote.’ That’s how he feels. That’s the level of confidence that he has,” Smith said.
Trump’s faith is not buttressed by information crawling out of nearly every poll, however, including those on Fox. One particularly hurtful Fox News poll released this week asked registered voters what worries them most heading into the midterms. And the winning topic was not affordability or the economy, but government corruption, with a whopping 88 percent of voters saying they were “extremely or very concerned” about it. It even beat high gas and grocery prices and healthcare.
Worse, that same survey had Trump’s approval sinking to 36 percent, the lowest Fox has ever recorded for him. And in other polls, it’s dipped into the 20s.
In his interview, Smith also appeared astounded that Trump had more than four hours to dedicate to a dinner, considering the heavy load of problems facing the administration and the nation.
“It was shocking. I didn’t I certainly didn’t expect that amount of time. I knew that we were expecting to have dinner. I knew that we were going to have an opportunity to talk. I give him all the credit in the world because he didn’t run from any questions … But he also took us for a tour of the White House, took us to the West Wing, took us to the Rose Garden, took us to the colonnade where you got pictures of every single president, but Joe Biden,” said Smith.
