Photo: Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Donald Trump suffers from chronic election denialism that goes well beyond his well-known insistence, against all evidence, that he won the 2020 presidential election. Trump actually misstates all of his presidential results. He’s said he was robbed of a popular-vote win in 2016 by massive illegal voting and fraudulent vote counting. And Trump has never been satisfied by the 2024 election results, in which he won the Electoral College but only beat Kamala Harris by a slim 1.5 percent of the popular vote. He keeps telling us he won by a massive, historic landslide, never entirely making it clear whether he’s just spinning the numbers or padding his lead with more undocumented voter-fraud fables.
Worse yet, Trump gradually got into the habit of election denialism on behalf of other losing Republican candidates. By 2024, his obsessive focus on the evils of immigration led him to embrace the basics of the Great Replacement Theory, which claims Democrats deliberately herd millions of illegal immigrants to the polls to steal elections at every level. And so now Trump sees fraud behind every Republican defeat in states like California, and shows every indication that he likely won’t accept a Democratic victory in the 2026 midterms. The effect on rank-and-file Republicans’ faith in free and fair elections is predictably dire.
But election denialism isn’t an isolated vice in MAGA-land. Trump has championed poll denialism, too. This helps make election denialism plausible to his committed followers, as Media Matters explains:
Trump is an historically unpopular president. Polls over the decade since he entered the political spotlight have consistently found that he is broadly disliked, and his job approval is currently tracking near its all-time lows. …
The president has responded to these dire numbers not by trying to appeal to a broader swath of the country but by declaring that he is actually popular and that news outlets have fabricated these results to damage his political standing.
“Fake polls — I got one today,” the president told reporters in February. “I saw one today that I’m at 40%. I’m not at 40%. I’m at much higher than that. I’d love to run against anybody. The real polls say ‘you’d kill everybody, it wouldn’t even be close.’”
In late June, he likewise argued that other, unnamed surveys show his “REAL POLL NUMBERS ARE THE HIGHEST THEY HAVE EVER BEEN,” with his job approval at “at 65%, and more!”
Occasionally Trump is able to cherry-pick outlier polls that show wide public approbation of his performance as president. Here he is at a February 2025 CPAC conference bragging about his numbers:
Our approval rating is now the highest ever across all demographics. Rasmussen just came out at 56 percent; InsiderAdvantage, 56; RMG Research, 57 percent. And we have many polls in the mid-60s. One at 71 percent—we like that, 71.
At this point in his second term, Trump’s job-approval polling averages were narrowly positive but systematically lower than he boasted. At Silver Bulletin his average approval rating on the day of the CPAC conference was 48.7 percent. But the exaggeration was far more egregious in November 2025, when Trump made this claim at Truth Social:
I HAVE JUST GOTTEN THE HIGHEST POLL NUMBERS OF MY “POLITICAL CAREER.” While my great work on the Economy has not yet been fully appreciated, it will be! Things are really Rockin’. Stopping WARS and Foreign Relations seems to be a strong suit. Also great, The Border and Stopping Crime. I predict that the Economy, with the already HIGHEST STOCK MARKET, EVER, and prices coming sharply down from the Biden disaster, will soon be at the top of the list. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
It’s notable that the president didn’t bother to offer any documentation, however skewed, for this claim. That’s understandable, since his job-approval numbers were actually plunging at that juncture. Silver Bulletin pegged his job approval at 41 percent and his disapproval at 55 percent as he celebrated his unequaled popularity. Even more egregiously, Trump posted this on June 29, 2026:
Highest Poll Numbers Ever. Even Higher than Election Day, November 5th. This despite the fact that, IRAN WILL NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!
Trump’s “poll numbers” that day were far from high, much less “the Highest Ever.” Per Silver Bulletin they were at 39.5 percent approval and 57.4 percent disapproval. Indeed, the averages showed 47.2 percent of Americans strongly disapproving of the president’s job performance.
It’s hardly breaking news that Trump exaggerates, makes things up, and outright lies on a scale that does indeed make him the “greatest president ever” when it comes to habitual mendacity. But relentlessly misstating his popularity conditions his followers to believe any adverse election results must be fake. How could a man this popular lose? How could his party lose? The Democrats — or “Dumocrats,” as he’s taken to calling them — must be cheating again!
