How to keep the toddler amusedby digby
The baby wants his good polls or he’s going to have a tantrum:
As a TV host, Donald Trump loved ratings. As president, he loves polls — as long as they show him on the upswing.
He crowed on Twitter hours after landing back in Washington from his 12-day Asia tour about his Rasmussen number — 46 percent — noting it was “one of the most accurate” in 2016, and decried “fake news” polls showing his approval in the 30s while also suggesting, with no evidence, that “some people” think his numbers could be in the 50s. (The Rasmussen poll sank to 42 percent on Friday.)
Aides in the White House often show Trump polls designed to make him feel good, according to aides and advisers. Usually they’re the ones that focus just on voters who cast ballots for him in 2016 or are potential Trump supporters —Trump’s base — but occasionally include public polls like Rasmussen, depending on what the numbers say.
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Concerns grow in the White House when the support slides among voters who picked Trump in 2016, several senior aides and advisers said. Aides in Trump’s political affairs shop shrug off public polls that survey the general public. Most of the public pollsters are seen as “not understanding him,” one senior White House official said, a position carried over from the campaign, when many polls underestimated support for Trump and showed him losing in key counties that he won.Adviser Jared Kushner often tells Trump not to trust traditional data, while former chief White House strategist Steve Bannon used to tell Trump to focus only on the 40 percent or so of Americans who make up his base.
John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff, has limited interest in polling data and doesn’t get deeply involved in parsing it, aides said.
Yet several 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.
I wonder what they think that big poll on election day across the country this month told them? Fake returns?
He needs to be coddled and feted as a winner or … what? The staff seems to have convinced themselves that this is a smart way to slice and dice the data for the purpose of getting congress to vote in their alleged best interest. But members of congress know what the poll numbers are. They don’t need Trump’s phony polling about the base to see what the stakes are. And they also know that mid-terms are referendums on the president and he is a huge orange albatross around their necks.
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