President Trump still admires poll numbers just as much as he did during his presidential campaign, and his advisers have reportedly figured out that it’s much easier to keep Trump happy if you only show him positive numbers. According to Politico, “Aides in the White House often show Trump polls designed to make him feel good,” like internal polls, the ones that show him maintaining his popularity with Trump supporters, or right-leaning polls like the Rasmussen one that recently showed him with a 46 percent approval rating.
White House aides use these rosier poll results to cheer Trump up as well as attempt to coerce support from members of Congress — though it’s not at all clear that Republican lawmakers have been very convincible in that regard. Public polls, after all, rarely have good news for Trump or the GOP these days, and Politico adds that some White House officials aren’t happy about Trump being misled:
[S]everal senior officials said they don’t trust the internal polls because they are “delusional” or “just not accurate,” in the words of two officials. The numbers Trump are shown are almost always higher than his public polling numbers. “I wouldn’t trust our polling on that,” one senior aide said, after ticking off numbers on health care earlier this year.
This is also hardly the first time we’ve heard about White House staff coddling the president, trying to arrange praise, or treating him like a tantrum-prone toddler.
But Trump is not totally cut off from bad polling numbers. The ratings-obsessed former reality-television star apparently finds his own poll fixes, too, like the Gallup daily tracking poll, which currently gives him a 39 percent approval rating. Those numbers, unlike the ones his aides feed him, reportedly upset the president, which indicates that he probably does not believe they are as fake as his tweet history suggests.
