Trump Says Any Negative Polls About Him Are "Fake News"

Any negative polls are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election. Sorry, people want border security and extreme vetting.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 6, 2017

Cool sports game last night but it sure didn’t take long for Donnie to continue his assault on the media. To continue the predictable ridiculousness that is his presidential tweeting. And make no mistake about it, saying that any negative polls are fake news is about as ridiculous as it gets. It’s fucking absurd.

Look, were the election polls wrong? They sure were. Five Thirty Eight themselves wrote this the day after election day.

So there’s definitely some truth to the notion that you can’t fully trust polls because the polls were very wrong for one of the biggest, most intense, most controversial elections in our history. But saying, and I quote, “any negative polls are fake news” is fucking RIDICULOUS. It’s an ignorant, irresponsible, shitty tweet for a number of reasons.

1) If he would’ve said something along the lines of “you can’t trust polls in general because they’ve proven to be wrong” that’d be one thing. That’d be fine. I could fuck with that. But saying “any negative poll is fake news” is saying “hey anything that’s negative about me is completely made up to fool you” and that’s just not true. Not even close.

You can shit on polls but if you’re going to do it you have to shit on all polls, not just polls not in your favor.

2) “Fake news” is a very real, very dangerous, very alarming thing and diminishing its relevancy is flat out irresponsible. To be clear, “fake news” refers to made up stories typically using something like a similar URL to that of real news outlets to appear legitimate. These stories were shared hundreds of thousands of times online and in the three months leading up to the election, it’s believed more “fake news” stories were shared than real ones.

That’s a problem, and calling what pollsters do “fake news” is blatantly wrong and immature.

3) There are more but I’m in that horrific state of still drunk/hungover and that’s all you’re gonna get right now.

While yes, I do believe the media fucking despises Trump and that that, to some small degree, affects the purity of their coverage of his presidency, it’s still a far cry from “fake news.” They may take a microscope to every little thing he does and significantly blow out of proportion both the mistakes he makes and the portrayed outrage to those actions they deem mistakes, but they don’t make up polls. They don’t fabricate out of nowhere negative stories to fuck The Donald.

And that is where saying “any negative polls are fake news” is absolutely ridiculous.