As President Donald Trump celebrated his first 100 days in office Tuesday, the legacy media have touted polls purportedly showing voters have widespread buyer’s remorse — but one of the industry’s more accurate pollsters says the number of Americans who believe the country is on the right track has been “setting a record for 13 consecutive weeks.”

Numerous media outlets, including some starkly critical of their strained relationship with the White House, have released polls stating that the American people rate President Trump as a rank failure in office:

• “Twice as many people said President Trump deserves a grade of F rather than an A for how he’s handled his first 100 days in office, according to a new NPR/PBS News/Marist poll” — 45% gave the president an F, while 23% graded his presidency an A, reported NPR (at your expense; PBS also covered the poll). “Trump’s overall approval rating is down to 42%, including just 36% among independents. For context, when looking at Gallup’s numbers back to Harry Truman, this would be the second-worst approval rating for any president at the 100-day mark in those 80 years. The lowest? First-term Trump by a point.”
• “Just over 4 in 10 Americans strongly disapprove of the job the president is doing, while only a quarter strongly approve,” according to an NBC News story about a new NBC News Stay Tuned Poll, powered by SurveyMonkey.
• CNN claimed earlier this week that, “as the 100-day mark of his presidency approaches, Americans’ views of what he’s done so far have turned deeply negative, a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS finds. Trump’s 41% approval rating is the lowest for any newly elected president at 100 days dating back at least to Dwight Eisenhower — including Trump’s own first term.”
• “Donald Trump has the lowest 100-day job approval rating of any president in the past 80 years, with public pushback on many of his policies and extensive economic discontent, including broad fears of a recession, according to a new ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll,” said ABC News. That outlet also asserted that the American people hold both parties roughly in equal contempt: “Our poll found that 69% of Americans say the Democratic Party is out of touch with the concerns of most people in the country while 60% say the same of Trump and 64% the same of the Republican Party.” (ABC also claimed without proof that “California Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has ingratiated himself with conservative figures via his podcast.”)
• “President Trump’s approval rating after 100 days back in office (42%) is 12 percentage points lower than Joe Biden’s was at the same stage of his presidency (54%), according to a new Yahoo News/YouGov poll,” Yahoo News declared. “The gap between Trump’s 100-day disapproval rating (53%) and Biden’s (37%) is even larger: 16 points.”

One pollster believes the news media have an agenda with their coverage. 

“For some reason, Trump approval is way more interesting than Biden approval, Obama approval, or Bush approval ever was,” Mark Mitchell, the chief pollster at the conservative-leaning Rasmussen Reports, told “Washington Watch” guest host and former Congressman Jody Hice on Monday. “People are seeing headlines, they’re hearing stories, they’re getting push notifications to their phone. And it’s all the mainstream media trying to undermine Trump, to convince you that he’s not popular. Another sign is that some of the pollsters, like ABC News, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, haven’t even really polled Trump approval in months. And all of a sudden, six of the pollsters dumped polls over the weekend that were really horrible for Trump.”

Rasmussen’s daily presidential tracker poll shows 47% of Americans approve of Trump’s performance as president, while 51% disapprove. Rasmussen also found 42% of Americans believe the country is on the right track, compared to 51% on the wrong track — but a pollster says those numbers place the president broadly in the norm, not at an eight-decade low.

“We’re the only people in the industry still polling approval on a daily basis. And what I can tell you is that if you take the first six months of Obama’s first term away and look at the rest of his polling, that’s pretty much where Trump approval has been — and is going to be.”

“You’re never going to see a Trump 60% approval rating. But I don’t think it’s going to drop below 45%, either,” Mitchell told Hice.

Mitchell said this week that the pivotal number is the right track/wrong track poll. “We’ve been in business 20 years and, alongside presidential approval, the question we ask is, ‘Is the country headed in the right direction or has it gotten off on the wrong track?’ And people have been really unhappy for a long time. Right direction has always been less than wrong track, except for one week — and that week happened a month and a half ago: Under Trump’s second administration, it got up to 48%, the highest it’s ever been in our polling history. And now it’s setting a record for 13 consecutive weeks [at] 42% or higher. The previous record was only seven weeks, and that was also in a Trump term.”

Rasmussen’s “right direction polling is setting records on a weekly basis now, because Americans are finally getting what they voted for” in the 2024 presidential election, Mitchell continued. “Trump is an economic populist, and the general trend has been that Trump was elected because of the American Dream, our futures, the ability to put food on the table, to form families, to buy affordable houses, all that stuff has been stolen and shipped overseas.”

Mitchell noted the same polls “were six, seven, and even eight points to the left of me back in the fall.”

On the eve of the 2024 election, legacy media polls presented the Harris-Walz campaign as a surging, joyful movement that stood a real chance of retaining the White House. Yet David Plouffe, a senior Harris campaign adviser with strong links to Barack Obama, later admitted that at no point did the campaign’s internal polls show the Democratic ticket leading the 45th, and now 47th president with the American people. “There were these public polls that came out in late September, early October, showing us with leads that we never saw,” Plouffe told the “Pod Save America” podcast.

NBC News and ABC News gave Kamala Harris a three-point lead over Trump going into Election Day (49% to 46%), while CBS News polls had the two candidates tied. On the other hand, Rasmussen Reports predicted a 2.4% lead for Trump. On November 5, Trump beat Harris by 2.5 million votes, winning the popular vote by 1.5% and triumphing in every swing state en route to a 31-state, Electoral College landslide.

Mitchell previously stated that pollsters are “mouthpieces of the government” and oligarchical corporate leaders. “When your pollsters all report up to organizations that are owned by massive corporations that have vested interests in making sure that the corporate oligarchy status quo in D.C. maintains its control, that’s what happens. They are literally mouthpieces for the government, and I’ve proven that they shill for Democrats,” Mitchell told “Washington Watch” last November.

Mitchell told Hice Monday this reflects “a collapse in integrity in all of our institutions. And if you see this happen in the FBI, if you see it happen in corporate boardrooms, if you see it happen in church denominations, it’s probably happening in newsrooms, too. If your boss, or your boss’s boss, or your boss’s friend in D.C. really wants some headline, and your paycheck depends on it, you’re probably going to give them that headline. And are some people doing it not on purpose? Sure. And also there are some honest pollsters that are out there having their headlines and their numbers cherry picked as well.”

Mitchell does not look for the polling to materially change. “There’s a vacuum in the Democratic Party.”