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Photo: Graeme Sloan/Bloomberg/Getty Images

President Trump says all sorts of wild things on his infamous Truth Social account. But this week in his fury at Fox News for not becoming even more lavishly sycophantic toward him than it already is, he said something so hallucinatory that it really must be called out (emphasis mine):

Why is FoxNews and Peter Doocy putting on Democrat Senator Mark Kelly to talk about, totally unabated or challenged, Healthcare? The FAKE SPIN is so bad for Republicans that it is hard to believe that we WIN. It will be very unfair, in the future, when they don’t have “TRUMP” to fight for them. Therefore, we should fix it, NOW! I’m watching this Interview. It just doesn’t end. Fox should either get on board, or get off board, NOW, but at this point, it just doesn’t make any difference to me. They suck up the Ratings because of us, and then spin them in the Democrats’ direction. They refuse to put up Polls that correctly show me at 65% in Popularity, a Republican RECORD, but if I have a fake bad “Poll,” many of which are done by Fox (One of the worst “Pollsters” out there is the FoxNews Poll), they put them up immediately, and with gusto. Republicans are so tired of this fight with Fox always trying to be so “politically correct!” Thank you for your attention to this matter.

I have no idea where Trump came up with that 65 percent number, but it wasn’t from any publicly available poll measuring his job-approval rating, past or present. The highest second-term job-approval number I can find in RealClearPolitics’s vast database is from the extremely Trump-friendly outlet Insider Advantage, which showed him at 56 percent approval on the day of his second inauguration (January 20). His all-time-highest job-approval rating in either term was from the equally Trump-friendly Rasmussen Reports, which put him at 57 percent a couple of days after his first inauguration. Neither of those peak numbers, of course, is anything like 65 percent. For context, his net job approval has been underwater every day since March 13 this year according to RCP’s averages, which are generally better for Trump than others. And during his first term, according to the same outlet’s averages, Trump’s net approval rating went underwater, too, a week after he took office and stayed that way until he finally vacated the White House.

As for that “Republican RECORD” Trump cited … well, not really. George W. Bush hit 90 percent and his father, Poppy Bush, hit 89 percent job approval per Gallup (the pollster with the most historical data) immediately after their respective wars with Iraq. Ronald Reagan hit 68 percent job approval twice (in 1981 and in 1986). Gerald Ford managed a 71 percent job-approval rating from Gallup in 1974. Richard Nixon got to 67 percent job approval in 1969 and again in 1973. And Dwight D. Eisenhower got to 79 percent just after his reelection in 1956. Trump is actually the only post–World War II Republican president never to have reached the 65 percent he claims, and he hasn’t even gotten close, not once, ever.

Now it’s entirely possible Trump pays somebody to tell him what he wants to hear about his popularity, much as he apparently hired a failed historian to tell him his narrow 2024 presidential victory was a historic landslide that gave him a mandate to do as he wishes. But if he’s mad a Fox News — or Insider Advantage, or Raz — for not showing him to be the most popular president of them all, he should probably keep it to himself. Better yet, someone he respects should let him in on the not-so-secret reality that even if he believes he’s saved or is saving America, Americans don’t much like him.

Someone Should Inform Trump That He’s Actually Unpopular

Someone Should Inform Trump That He’s Actually Unpopular