Trump lashes out over polls, calls for investigations of 'fake news'

Matthew Medsger, Boston Herald on Apr 28, 2025

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President Donald Trump lashed out at pollsters Monday after recent surveys showed a slump in his support, prompting his call for investigations into “fake news organizations” and alleged election fraud.

Trump, in a Monday morning Truth Social media post, said that recent polls from ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos and New York Times/Siena drew incorrect conclusions because they didn’t poll enough Trump supporters.

“The New York Times has only 37% Trump 2024 voters, and the ABC/Washington Post Poll has only 34% Trump Voters, unheard of numbers unless looking for a negative result, which they are. These people should be investigated for ELECTION FRAUD, and add in the FoxNews Pollster while you’re at it,” the U.S. president decreed.

The polls concerning “a person named Donald J. Trump, me,” the president said, are “fake polls from fake news organizations,” a proclamation he delivered in all caps while citing pollster John McLaughlin, who he described as “one of the most highly respected in the industry.”

McLaughlin, in response to inquiries received after the release of the polls, on Sunday shared the figures cited by the president and asked “didn’t we win [the] popular vote with 50%?”

According to a small New York Times/Siena poll of 913 registered voters, 54% of Americans disapprove of the overall job Trump is doing, compared to 42% who approve. Pollsters also found disapproving majorities on the president’s handling of the economy, immigration, the war in Ukraine, and trade.

Trump’s approval rating, the Times wrote along with their poll, “is historically low for a president this early in a term, but it is in line with his stubborn unpopularity, which did not prevent him from sweeping the battleground states in last year’s election.”

The poll’s crosstabs show that pollsters spoke to an even number of Trump supporters and people who voted for former Vice President Kamala Harris, at 38% of each, while 16% of those polled indicated they did not vote and 7% said they voted for someone else or refused to answer the question.

The ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll of 1,992 registered voters found Trump’s disapproval rating at 55% and his approval at 42%. His disapproval rating stays the same but his approval rating falls to 39% if the polling data is extended to include all 2,464 adults contacted by pollsters.

“The previous low in approval for a president at or near 100 days in office, in polls dating to 1945, was Trump’s 42% in 2017,” ABC noted with their poll.

Of the 2,419 Americans contacted for that poll who shared their vote from the 2024 election, 842 reported they voted for Trump, 848 said they voted for Harris, and 729 copped to skipping the ballot box. That means the polling data included about 35.0% Harris voters and 34.8% Trump voters.

In the last elections, President Trump earned 77,284,118 votes, or 49.8% of the votes cast for president, while Harris won 74,999,166 votes or 48.3% of votes cast.

According to the American Presidency Project, only 63.5% of the nation’s 244.7 million eligible voters cast a ballot for the president in 2024, meaning about 89.3 million voters stayed home or didn’t choose a presidential candidate. Of all eligible voters, around 31.6% picked Trump, approximately 30.7% voted for Harris, and about 36.5% chose no one.

Despite the relatively even sampling seen in the polls, Trump claimed pollsters are under-counting his core constituency and this makes them “negative criminals who apologize to their subscribers and readers after I WIN ELECTIONS BIG, much bigger than their polls showed I would win, loose [sic] a lot of credibility, and then go on cheating and lying for the next cycle, only worse.”

Trump went on to claim the organizations behind the polls are suffering from an incurable case of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” and are “truly the enemy of the people!”

“We don’t have a Free and Fair ‘Press’ in this Country anymore. We have a Press that writes BAD STORIES, and CHEATS, BIG, ON POLLS. IT IS COMPROMISED AND CORRUPT. SAD,” he said in separate social media post, emphasis his.

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