CNN data guru Harry Enten has offered a brutal “reality check” to Donald Trump as the president brags about eyebrow-raising polling results.
The president latched onto a poll cited last week that showed he had 100 percent favorability among MAGA voters. He described it as an “honor” and bragged about it publicly on at least two occasions.
Enten’s assessment was blunt. “Donald Trump has never been more unpopular in his second term in office,” he said on The Source with Kaitlan Collins on Thursday.
Enten circulated the NBC News poll last week. It actually found that, among the full sample, just 44 percent of respondents approved of Trump, while 54 percent disapproved. However, the bit that titillated the president was more nuanced than he was willing to admit.
The poll asked respondents if “You consider yourself to be a supporter of the MAGA movement,” to which 30 percent replied “yes.” So, the poll showed 100 percent of 30 percent of people approve of Trump.
The president took a victory lap regardless. “They said they’ve never seen a poll like that. The CNN poll said I’m 100 percent, and they’ve never seen that before, which is an honor,” he said on the White House lawn last Friday. He also brought the results up repeatedly at the National Republican Congressional Committee’s 2026 Annual Fundraising Dinner on Wednesday.
On Thursday, Enten had a message for Trump. Speaking to Collins on CNN, he said, “I’ll give you a reality check. Look, President Trump is quite popular with MAGA. MAGA very much enjoys this [Iran] war. They very much love the president. But of course, they are just a certain portion of the electorate. When you expand it out. The reality check is this. Donald Trump has never been more unpopular in his second term in office.”
He used a Fox News poll released on Wednesday to make his point. It surveyed 1,001 registered voters nationwide who were randomly selected from a national voter file. The results were damning for Trump, delivering his highest disapproval rating yet: 59 percent.
“And I will note this, Kaitlan Collins,” he continued. “It is not just the Fox News poll where Donald Trump is at an all-time highs in terms of his disapproval ratings, all-time lows in terms of his approval rating. It is in the polling aggregate as well. It has been poll after poll after poll in which he’s either at or near an all-time high in terms of his disapproval rating.”
At the time of writing, the New York Times’ daily average of dozens of polls has Trump’s disapproval rating at 56 percent. His approval rating is a meager 40 percent.
Trump’s war in Iran has caused a schism in the GOP and prompted independents to walk away. The conflict has caused economic chaos and hit Americans in the pocket.
However, Trump doesn’t appear to care. Speaking at the NRCC dinner on Wednesday, he said energy prices rising and the stock market recoiling “didn’t matter to me.”
“We had to get rid of the cancer, cut out the cancer. The cancer was Iran with a nuclear weapon,” he said
