President Donald Trump is a consummate liar, says Intelligencer writer Ed Kilgore, so you can tell how much something bothers him by the magnitude of lies he unloads to bury it.
Such is the case with the sheer magnitude of whoppers he’s been dumping on the internet to counter his hideous poll numbers.
“… [E]lection denialism isn’t an isolated vice in MAGA-land,” said Kilgore. “Trump has championed poll denialism, too. … 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,” Trump told the crowd with a ghastly talent for denying historic unpopularity.
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!” Trump howled.
Of course, the president didn’t bother to offer any documentation, notes Kilgore, because that would’ve been problematic. His job-approval numbers were actually plunging at that point, wth Silver Bulletin reporting his disapproval at 55 percent. But the worse it gets the bigger lies keep coming.
“Highest Poll Numbers Ever. Even Higher than Election Day, November 5th. This despite the fact that, IRAN WILL NOT HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON!” Trump posted on June 29. But he was actually at 39.5 percent per Silver Bulletin.
However, Trump’s colossal lies are bigger than just a failing president desperately self-soothing his pain, said Kilgore. This is an act of paving the way for new election denialism.
“… [R]elentlessly misstating his popularity conditions his followers to believe any adverse election results must be fake,” said Kilgore. “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!”
But this is what you can expect from a guy who’s already engaged in heavy election denialism, said Kilgore.
“Trump [even] 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.”