Donald Trump has reason to be discouraged about his unpopularity. Despite the president’s incessant boasts about his imagined accomplishments, the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll found his approval rating down to 40%. Around the same time, Quinnipiac University released its latest poll, which found the Republican’s support down to 37%. Other recent surveys have pointed in the same direction.
Nevertheless, Trump began the week with an item posted to his social media platform that began, “Except what is written and broadcast in the Fake News, I now have the highest poll numbers I’ve ever had, some in the 60’s and even 70’s. Thank you.”
The dishonesty was not surprising; the president has spent much of the year making up approval ratings for himself. What’s just as notable, however, is the number of Republicans who seem eager to play along.
Rep. Byron Donalds, a leading Republican gubernatorial candidate in Florida, told Fox News earlier this week that the president is “riding high with all-time high approval numbers.”
That was, of course, objectively and quantitatively wrong, but the congressman was hardly alone.
After California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently mocked Trump’s sinking public support, Republican Rep. Darrell Issa appeared on Fox Business to defend his party’s president. “The ultimate in false statements,” the California congressman said. “Trump’s low approval rating? It couldn’t be higher!”
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders has insisted that the president’s approval rating was “soaring.” Around the same time, Alina Habba, a former Trump-appointed acting U.S. attorney, also boasted that the president’s public support was “skyrocketing,” with an approval rating that had reached “an all-time high of anyone.” That was false, too.
Soon after, Republican Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio insisted that Trump has “never been more popular.”
Perhaps the piece de resistance came last month when House Speaker Mike Johnson declared on CNBC that Trump’s approval rating is “skyrocketing,” adding, “CNN had a story, I think a day or two ago, he was at a 90% approval rating. There’s never been a president that high.”
It led The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie to explain in a column:
[T]he substance of Johnson’s absurd claim about the president’s popularity is less interesting to me than the fact that he would even say it. The House speaker’s assertion that Trump was at a ‘90 percent approval rating’ is the kind of falsehood you might hear from authoritarian state media. It is a servile display of allegiance as much as it is an attempt to mislead viewers. It’s Johnson telling Trump he is his man.
There are, to be sure, a variety of explanations for GOP officials’ bizarre efforts to pretend that the president is wildly unpopular, all available evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Maybe they fear Trump’s wrath if they tell the truth. Perhaps they see value in keeping the party’s far-right base motivated and engaged.
But Bouie’s explanation resonates because it’s in keeping with everything else we’ve seen and learned about contemporary Republican politics: Donalds, Issa, Johnson, et al., feel the need to signal their loyalty to the White House, and in 2025, that means playing along with Trump’s lie about his incredible public esteem — which, in reality, is only incredible because no other modern president has seen his standing sink to such depths so quickly after Inauguration Day.
What’s more, it’s very easy to believe there’s a race to the bottom unfolding: The more some Republican voices endorse nonsensical claims about Trump’s approval rating, the more others in the party pick up on the cues and feel the need to repeat the lie.
It’s not healthy; it obviously misleads the GOP base; and it sets up the party for confusion and disappointment as the public backlash to Trump’s radical agenda grows, but it’s apparently the strategy Republicans have embraced with unnerving enthusiasm.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
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