Trump Says Polls That Show Him Losing ‘Suppress the Feelings’ of Voters
Credit to Author: Morgan Baskin| Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2019 15:20:04 +0000
President Trump railed against election polling on Thursday, equating the polls showing him losing to a handful of Democratic presidential candidates next year with “suppression.”
“All the polls are phony,” Trump told Fox News’s Brian Kilmeade in a radio interview on Thursday, saying that polls showing him losing to the 2020 presidential election were wrong because voters really do like him.
Suggesting otherwise, Trump said, could “suppress the feelings” of voters.
The latest round of general election matchup polls show Trump losing to the top five Democratic candidates for president.
He rolled those comments into a wider criticism of the media’s coverage of his reelection campaign.
Asked by Kilmeade whether he was “worried” by the crowd sizes at campaign events hosted by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) –– about 15,000 people turned out to her rally in Seattle last weekend –– Trump took the opportunity to lament coverage of his own events.
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“So that’s another thing. I have crowds that are many times that size,” Trump said, before throwing shade on Warren’s crowd. “If you really count [the people] up it looks like 8 or 9 [thousand]. That’s like a small crowd for me.”
He added that “nobody ever shows my crowd,” and that he “hasn’t had an empty seat” at any of his rallies.
“It’s a total double standard. I’m president of all people, and I love them all, but they treat certain people very unfairly,” Trump said.
His made those criticisms in a 20-minute interview, the latter half of which he spent denigrating a number of different cable news networks, including Fox News.
“MSNBC, CNN, all of them for the most part, they’re despicable people for the most part,” Trump said, later including Fox in that mix. “I’m not happy with Fox,” he said.
Trump later ranked the Fox News hosts he liked the most on a scale of one to ten, including the Fox host he was speaking with.
“Sean and Laura, and Tucker has really been very good. You guys in the morning, Ainslie and Steve and you –– I used to say you were solid six, maybe a seven.”
Kilmeade, presumably offended, began to push back on Trump’ criticisms of the network, including tweets Trump posted Wednesday morning that “We have to start looking for a new News Outlet. Fox isn’t working for us anymore!”
Cover: President Donald Trump speaks at the closing press conference of the G7 summit on 26 August 2019, in Biarritz, France. (Photo by David Speier/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
This article originally appeared on VICE US.