President Donald Trump attacked ABC and NBC polls as fake news and "totally wrong in general" Monday morning, quoting from parts of an ABC News/Washington Post poll that said 53% said Trump was a strong leader and saying new polls were "very good considering that much of the media is FAKE and almost always negative."
He also continued to maintain he would have won the popular vote, a curious claim that surfaces periodically.
He tweeted the assertion "Would still beat Hillary in popular vote," though it was unclear what he meant since Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by several million.
An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released April 23 found that 54% disapproved of the job President Trump was doing, compared with 40% who approved. The poll found that 82% of Republicans approved of the President's job performance to date (he marks his first 100 days in office April 29), while only 30% of independents and 7% of Democrats approved.
The survey found that only 50% give Trump high marks for being firm and decisive, down from 57% in a February poll. He gets "honest and trustworthy" high marks from 25%, down from 34% in February.
The poll was conducted April 17-20 among 900 adults. It has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.3 percentage points.
The ABC/Washington Post poll found that 42% approved of Trump's performance as President vs. 53% who disapproved, compared to an average 69%/19% approval/disapproval split for past presidents in approximately that first 100-day window.
Just 37% approve of Trump's plans for changes in federal spending—those include cuts to EPA funding and zeroing out noncommercial TV and radio federal funding, among others. And only 34% approved of his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner having major posts in the Administration.
But the poll did have some "brighter" spots for the President. It found that 73% approved of his pressuring companies to stay in the U.S., and 53% said he was a strong leader. In addition, 96% of Republicans who voted for Trump said they would do it again, so there was no buyer's remorse, as the poll put it.
The poll was conducted April 17-20, in English and Spanish, among a random sample of 1,004 adults. The margin of error is 3.5 points.
