President Donald Trump has a new target for his retribution campaign against the press: opinion polls he doesn’t like.
In a Truth Social post on Thursday, Trump announced that he was revising a lawsuit against The New York Times to include the organization’s polling research, which currently shows him tanking on everything from the economy and immigration to his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
“The Times Siena Poll, which is always tremendously negative to me, especially just before the Election of 2024, where I won in a Landslide, will be added to my lawsuit against The Failing New York Times,” he wrote.
“Fake Polls on the Economy, on the Border, on just about everything, are ridiculous and dangerous. The REAL Polls have been GREAT, but they refuse to print them,” he added in a subsequent post.
Trump’s announcement comes after he first filed a $15 million lawsuit against the New York Times in September, accusing the news organization of seeking to undermine his election campaign and disparage his reputation as a businessman.
But the president was dealt a blow four days after filing the suit when a federal judge in Florida threw it out, calling it “improper and impermissible” in its present form.
The president’s legal team refiled a shorter revised version a month later, with many of the original lengthy tributes to Trump—such as a sentence describing his 2024 victory as “the greatest personal and political achievement in American history”—no longer included.
The opinion poll Trump has since added to his battle against the Times was conducted in conjunction with Siena University.
In the final stretch of the 2024 election, it showed the then Republican candidate and Harris locked in a neck-and-neck battle for the popular vote, 48 percent to 48 percent.
The pair had remained effectively tied for months, with Joe Biden’s debate implosion, two attempts on Mr. Trump’s life, and hundreds of millions spent on advertisements seemingly doing little to change the trajectory of the race.
In the end, however, Trump ended up winning all seven battleground states and the popular vote, thanks in large part to working class voters being lured by his promises to bring down cost of living pressures and deal with America’s immigration crisis.
The latest survey released today now shows that a significant majority (56 percent) of voters disapprove of the president’s performance, and most say he is focused on the wrong issues. But Trump refuses to believe the numbers.
“Something has to be done about Fake Polls! They are truly OUT OF CONTROL,” he wrote on Thursday.
“We have the Greatest Economy in the History of our Country, we have the Strongest Border in History, nobody has ever done a job like I have done, and they have me in the low 40s. The Democrats destroyed Healthcare, I’m trying to fix it, and they give me FAKE low numbers.”
While Trump is not a fan of unflattering polls, he clearly likes others.
Speaking at the World Economic Forum on Wednesday, the president talked about once being so high in the polls that two of his favorite pollsters, John McLaughlin and Tony Fabrizio, had told him, “Sir, George Washington & Abraham Lincoln, if they came back and ran as president and Vice President, they couldn’t beat you.”
Trump’s lawsuit against the Times is not the only time he has sued the media.
He has also filed a $10 billion suit against The Wall Street Journal over a story about a birthday letter to Epstein; settled a $16 million defamation suit with Paramount/CBS for coverage of Kamala Harris; and sued The Des Moines Register and pollster Ann Selzer over a poll predicting a loss in Iowa last year.
