Propaganda Press Manufactured Trump’s ‘Tough’ Poll Numbers

Heading into President Donald Trump’s first State of the Union address of his second term, corporate media wanted to make sure Americans knew how much they supposedly dislike him. 

“Americans sour on Trump ahead of State of the Union, polls find,” Politico’s headline blared. The Democrat Party mouthpiece cited a Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll that found “only 39 percent of Americans approve of the way Trump is handling the job of president,” with 47 percent who “strongly disapprove.” 

ABC News, which paid Trump $15 million and offered a note of regret in 2024 to settle a defamation lawsuit involving its political hack anchor’s false accusations, insisted that “Trump’s State of the Union address comes at uncertain, even perilous, moment for his presidency.” The story cited its own poll that showed Trump’s approval numbers were at the lowest level of his year-old term. 

“On the economy, 57% disapprove compared to 41% who approve. On immigration, 58% disapprove compared to 40% who approve — a remarkable slide on issues that were once considered Trump’s strongest,” the propagandist media outlet reported. 

And there was much more of the same. 

There’s no doubt Trump’s approval ratings are underwater, as RealClearPolitics’ latest average of polls shows. It’s the polls and the motivations of the people behind them that are suspect, as we have witnessed time and again in the Trump era. 

As The Federalist’s Sean Davis has said, “Polls are irrelevant. The only thing that matters are ballots.” And Trump has routinely won the battle of the ballots even as “the polls” told voters the Republican couldn’t win.

Polls are commissioned and crafted to peddle a political narrative. Many are pushed by people who hate Donald Trump and his America First vision, many of the same people who have inundated the airways and choked pages with endless anti-Trump coverage.

‘92% Negative Coverage’

As the Media Research Center’s NewsBusters has reported, corporate TV news outlets pummelled the Trump administration with 92 percent negative coverage in the first 100 days of the president’s second term. 

“[T]he new Trump administration has faced a withering 92% negative coverage from ABC, CBS and NBC, whose flagship news programs averaged more than 19.3 million viewers during the first quarter of 2025, making them the most widely-watched news programs in the country,” the media tracker reports. 

Think all that negative coverage might have something to do with Trump’s underwater job approval ratings heading into Tuesday’s message to the joint session of Congress?

The negativity doesn’t end at the network news desk.  

Apple News continues to make right-leaning outlets disappear, according to NewsBusters. The magic of Apple, Communist China’s BFF. Of the 620 top stories featured by the news app between Jan. 1 and Jan. 31 this year, not one was from a right-of-center media outlet. 

Nearly half of voting-age Americans own an Apple iPhone, and Apple News comes pre-installed, NewsBusters notes. So Americans are force-fed a constant diet of left-leaning information/narrative, much of it attacking Trump and his administration. 

And the beat goes on for the Big Four News Apps, suppressing conservative content and pushing an “elitist media narrative” on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement shootings in Minneapolis, the media watchdog reports. 

“Apple News, Google News, MSN and Yahoo News flooded their websites with elitist, anti-ICE coverage after a federal agent shot Renee Nicole Good, who authorities said hit the agent with her car,” NewsBusters reported. “The heavy promotion of left-leaning outlets came despite conflicting accounts of what occurred in the moments leading up to the fatal shooting.”

Trying to find reporting from The Federalist or other conservative news outlets is like finding a congressional Democrat who likes Trump: Nearly impossible. 

As Davis said in testimony last fall during a Senate Commerce Committee hearing on government-driven speech suppression, he and Federalist staff were “directly targeted for destruction by my own government, using my tax dollars.” 

“Even worse, much of the targeting was done in secret, by individuals and institutions who were desperate to hide their illegal and unconstitutional actions against us,” Davis said. 

With such throttling from the dominant information providers, Trump’s many achievements in a vigorous first year in office have been smothered, while the left’s constant attack on Trump and his administration has been omnipresent. 

So is it any wonder The Washington Post’s headline over the weekend declared, “60% disapprove of Trump ahead of State of the Union” in a story promoting its own poll? 

As NewsBusters Managing Editor Curtis Houck observed while watching ABC’s pre-game coverage of Trump’s address, the negative polling they have helped manufacture was one of their biggest talking points. 

“ABC opens its #SOTU with all negativity, all Trump hate. …” Houck wrote, noting ABC News anchor David Muir’s assessment that, “President Trump knows millions will be watching tonight amid tough new polls for him. …”

Matt Kittle is a senior elections correspondent for The Federalist. An award-winning investigative reporter and 30-year veteran of print, broadcast, and online journalism, Kittle previously served as the executive director of Empower Wisconsin.