General Discussion

July 18, 2025, 2:49 PM EDT
By Steve Benen

A few months ago, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders appeared on Fox News and boasted that Donald Trump’s approval rating was “soaring.” It wasn’t: The Republican governor just made that up.

Around the same time, Alina Habba, a Trump-appointed acting U.S. attorney, also boasted on Fox News that the president’s public support was “skyrocketing,” with an approval rating that has reached “an all-time high of anyone.” That was false, too ...

... the president has repeatedly demonstrated that he has an unnerving habit of making up approval ratings for himself. And at first blush, that’s the easy explanation for why Johnson would peddle such an absurdity to a national television audience ...

Consider the CNN poll the congressman was referring to. The network’s national survey actually showed Trump with a 42% approval rating, which was roughly in line with recent averages. In fact, The New York Times has a frequently updated graph, reflecting polling averages, and it currently shows 52% of the public disapproves of the president, while 44% approve ...

https://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/maddowblog/weird-reason-speaker-mike-johnson-claimed-trump-90-approval-rating-rcna219651