Believe no one but him

Suppression polls?  He just made that up, didn't he?  Sometimes referred to by himself.

As Politico recently detailed, the Trump campaign put together a 17-state polling project that found the president lagging behind Democratic frontrunner Joe Biden in key battleground states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan. But according to the New York Times’s Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman, after he was briefed about the “devastating” polling, Trump told his aides to deny it and instead tout polls showing him doing better.

  Vox

Late at night, using his old personal cellphone number, President Trump has been calling former advisers who have not heard from him in years, eager to discuss his standing in the polls.

[...]

[C]ampaign aides see [his Tuesday Iowa visit to an ethanol plant], as well as a later appearance at a Republican dinner, as an opportunity to both troll Mr. Biden and invigorate a candidate who needs an identifiable opponent to keep his interest and who has been alternately engrossed in and detached from his re-election effort.

[...]

[W]ith a limited policy agenda and little interest in governing, Mr. Trump has been running for re-election virtually since the day he won. For the most part, though, he has been letting his campaign operatives get things organized without immersing himself in the details.

[...]

He has shown no interest in formulating a new message for his campaign, instead continuing with the winning “Make America Great Again” slogan from his last race and adding that he also wants to “keep America great.”

[...]

He insists on having final approval over the songs on his campaign playlist, as well as the campaign merchandise, but he has never asked to see a budget for 2019.

[...]

Unlike his last presidential race, during which Mr. Trump was concerned about spending because it was his own money on the line, he has not pressed for details. And he has made it clear that he does not relish participating in fund-raisers, leaving much of the donor maintenance and hand-holding to Vice President Mike Pence.

[...]

Mr. Trump may be indifferent to the mechanics of running a presidential campaign, in part because he continues to view his 2016 victory as driven almost entirely by his own force of personality and messaging.

[...]

But many of his private, election-related conversations, aides said, tend to center on Mr. Biden. In conversations with donors and allies, the president has continued to refer to him as feeble (Mr. Biden is 76; Mr. Trump is turning 73 this week) and noted that he was part of the Washington establishment, giving Mr. Trump the opportunity to run as the outsider even from his perch in the Oval Office.

[...]

He has tried workshopping versions of those critiques as Twitter attacks, referring to Mr. Biden as “sleepy” and “swampman,” and blaming him for the 1994 crime bill that critics say increased mass incarceration. West Wing aides have been discussing another criminal justice reform event as a vehicle to underscore Mr. Biden’s support of the crime bill.

[...]

[J]ust a week before the rally, Mr. Trump continues to function without a chief political strategist, people involved in his campaigns said. The president’s lead pollster, Mr. Fabrizio, is someone Mr. Trump resisted hiring in 2016, and his blunt approach is not always welcome by a candidate who prefers good news and can take a shoot-the-messenger approach to receiving information he does not like.

[...]

Trump, hoping to turn the attention of the race back onto himself, will officially kick off his re-election campaign on June 18 with a mega-rally in Florida, a state he must win in 2020 but where his numbers are softer than the campaign would like.

  NYT

[T]here are a couple of reasons not to give much credence to Trump’s tweet. First, as CNN detailed in December, Rasmussen — which is known to skew to the right — was the least accurate pollster out of any that released generic congressional ballot polls in the runup to November’s midterm elections:

Rasmussen’s final poll was the least accurate of any of the 32 polls. They had the Republicans ahead nationally by one point. Democrats are currently winning the national House vote by 8.6 points. That’s an error of nearly 10 points.

Secondly, and relatedly, the Rasmussen poll Trump cited is an outlier when compared to others. For instance, RealClearPolitics’ aggregated polling of Trump’s approval rating, which includes Rasmussen, currently has it pegged at a much more problematic 44 percent, with 53 percent disapproving of his job performance.

[...]

[S]tate polls from Morning Consult found Trump’s approval rating below his disapproval rating in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, and Indiana. Especially bleak is the fact that Trump’s approval rating is more than a dozen points underwater in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Iowa — all states he won in 2016.

[...]

[I]n fairness to Trump, it is true that state-level polls underestimated his support in 2016, even if national ones were more accurate about Hillary Clinton’s 2.1 percent margin of popular vote victory than Trump would have you believe. It’s undeniable, however, that the 2020 polling, taken in its totality, doesn’t look good for Trump right now.

  Vox

I wonder why he didn't mention the Times by name.

Trump in Iowa:

I'm  interested in his spray tan at this event.  It looks heavier than normal, and it looks like his shower cap or whatever he covers his hair with got a little low.  There's an obvious line down his temple, in front of his ear and down his neck.




He said "you have to clean those floors" - "I don't use the word sweeping".

Not any more, he doesn't.