Trump fumes on Twitter as poll shows majority of Americans oppose his travel ban
President Trump trashed polls that show a majority of Americans oppose his executive order banning immigration from seven predominantly Muslim countries.
“Any negative polls are fake news,” Trump tweeted from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Fla., on Monday. “Sorry, people want border security and extreme vetting.”
Like many of Trump’s early-morning Twitter missives, the broadside followed a cable news segment about the topic at hand. A panel on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” discussed a recent CNN/ORC poll that found that 53 percent of U.S. adults oppose Trump’s executive order on immigration, compared with 47 percent who say they support it.
The executive order in question, signed by Trump late last month, bars people from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen from entering the United States for 90 days. It also prevents all refugees from entering the United States for 120 days and indefinitely suspends the entry of refugees from Syria. The order caused some people with current visas to be detained and led to widespread protests and legal challenges.
Over the weekend, a federal judge ordered the suspension of Trump’s travel ban, and the Department of Homeland Security said it would comply with the ruling. (On Twitter, Trump ripped “the opinion of this so-called judge” and vowed the ruling would be overturned.) A federal appeals court declined to immediately reverse the ruling.
The CNN/ORC poll, released Friday, also showed that 53 percent of Americans disapprove of the job Trump is doing. This is a historic low among recently elected presidents since the advent of modern polling.
The president compared such surveys to national polls that showed Trump trailing Hillary Clinton by roughly 2 to 4 percentage points on the eve of the November election. However, those polls were largely correct: Trump won the presidency by capturing the Electoral College, but Clinton won the popular vote by almost 2.9 million votes, 65,853,625 to 62,985,106, a margin of 2.1 percent.
Nonetheless, a defiant Trump declared he’s his own boss.
“I call my own shots, largely based on an accumulation of data, and everyone knows it,” he tweeted. “Some FAKE NEWS media, in order to marginalize, lies!”
Trump has long exhibited an obsession with polls, as a candidate, then as president-elect and now as commander in chief.
During the primary, for example, Trump repeatedly complained that media outlets weren’t using a CNN Iowa poll that showed him in the lead before the Iowa caucuses. (Texas Sen. Ted Cruz won; Trump finished second.)
Last month, on the eve of his inauguration, Trump denounced as “phony” and “rigged” a pair of polls showing him to be the most unpopular newly elected president in at least 40 years.
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