Trump Says Media `Distorting Democracy’ in Morning Tweets
“With all of its phony unnamed sources & highly slanted & even fraudulent reporting, #Fake News is DISTORTING DEMOCRACY in our country,” Trump told his almost 40 million Twitter followers.
An ABC/Washington Post poll released Sunday showed Trump’s approval rating at 36 percent, down six points from a survey taken after his first 100 days. The previous president closest to that level after six months in office was Gerald Ford, at 39 percent, in February 1975.
Trump tweeted about the ABC poll, saying that “even though almost 40% is not bad at this time, was just about the most inaccurate poll around election time!”
About 63 percent of those polled said it was inappropriate for Trump’s son, son-in-law Jared Kushner and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort to have met with a Russian lawyer offering information on Democrat Hillary Clinton. Six in 10 also think Russia tried to influence the campaign, and among those who say so, 67 percent think Trump aides helped, similar to results in April.
The ABC poll was conducted by landline and mobile phone July 10-13, in English and Spanish, among a random sample of 1,001 adults. It had a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percent.
‘Being Scorned’
Trump thanked former campaign adviser Michael Caputo in a tweet “for saying so powerfully that there was no Russian collusion in our winning campaign.” Caputo testified to the House Intelligence Committee on Friday as part of an investigation into Russian meddling in the U.S. election.
The president also defended his son, who he “is being scorned by the Fake News Media.” On Saturday, quarterly Federal Election Commission disclosures revealed a $50,000 payment made by Trump’s campaign to the law firm now working for Trump Jr. in the matter the 2016 meeting with the Russian lawer.
The president has been at at his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, since Friday evening and plans to spend part of Sunday watching the U.S. Women’s Open golf tournament for a third day before returning to Washington.
Separately on Sunday, an NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey taken July 8-12 showed that Trump’s job approval rating stands at 50 percent in 439 counties across 16 states that fueled his 2016 victory, against 46 percent disapproval.
The president held an approval rating of 56 percent in areas won by Trump after also voting for Republican candidate Mitt Romney in 2012, known as “surge counties.” But in so-called “flip counties,” which voted for Trump in 2016 after being won by Barack Obama in 2016, Trump’s job rating was 44 percent.
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