The Hill is out with a piece that says Donald Trump has been forced to scold his own people to not believe the internal polling showing him in trouble against Joe Biden for the general election…
Heck, it’s so bad that polling shows even Bernie Sanders ahead of Trump, but by a lesser amount than Biden….
Trump doesn’t seem to be able to bring himself back a bit from the edge and could very well keep himself going for a loss next year with his own actions….
President Trump on Wednesday blasted “fake news” and “fake polling” following reports that internal polling showed him trailing former Vice President Joe Biden in a hypothetical 2020 matchup.
The president claimed “Fake Polling” showed him behind his potential opponents, but insisted that was not the case. A Quinnipiac University poll released Tuesday afternoon showed Trump trailing six prospective Democratic presidential candidates nationally by healthy margins.
“The Fake News has never been more dishonest than it is today. Thank goodness we can fight back on Social Media. There new weapon of choice is Fake Polling, sometimes referred to as Suppression Polls (they suppress the numbers),” Trump tweeted.
“The Fake (Corrupt) News Media said they had a leak into polling done by my campaign which, by the way and despite the phony and never ending Witch Hunt, are the best numbers WE have ever had,” he added. “They reported Fake numbers that they made up & don’t even exist. WE WILL WIN AGAIN!”
The president offered a similar criticism on Tuesday when asked about a New York Times report that he instructed his aides to deny internal polling that shows him trailing Biden in key states.
“My poll numbers are great,” he said, describing surveys that have him performing poorly in toss-up states as “fake polls.”…
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A ‘I’m doing my own thing Donald Trump….’
….In a recent overarching state-of-the-race briefing in Florida with Brad Parscale, his campaign manager, Mr. Trump was consistently distracted and wanted to discuss other things, according to people familiar with the meeting. When it came to the campaign, his main focus was on his own approval numbers.
Unlike nearly every recent modern president who sought re-election, Mr. Trump rarely if ever speaks to aides about what he hopes to accomplish with what would be a hard-won second term; his interest is entirely in the present, and mostly on the crisis of the moment. He has shown no interest in formulating a new message for his campaign, instead continuing with the winning “Make America Great Again” slogan from his last race and adding that he also wants to “keep America great.”
Mr. Trump has griped about traveling too much, but then lashed out at aides, demanding to know, “Why am I not doing more rallies?” He insists on having final approval over the songs on his campaign playlist, as well as the campaign merchandise, but he has never asked to see a budget for 2019.
His lack of interest in the bones of his campaign is not wholly out of the ordinary for an incumbent running for re-election. “At this point in the cycle,” President Barack Obama “was pretty consumed by governing,” David Axelrod, a former top adviser to Mr. Obama, said of his re-election focus. “He was briefed on the start-up, but we didn’t have our first big campaign meeting until the fall of 2011.”
But with a limited policy agenda and little interest in governing, Mr. Trump has been running for re-election virtually since the day he won….
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