On Tuesday, the president-elect dismissed recent polling showing his abysmal approval ratings. The latest was a Washington Post-ABC News survey that finds him to be “the least popular incoming president in at least four decades.” Trump said Americans should ignore the crooked media, because it failed to predict his election:
The same people who did the phony election polls, and were so wrong, are now doing approval rating polls. They are rigged just like before.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 17, 2017
The first problem with this argument is that the polls weren’t so wrong. As Washington Post reporter Aaron Blake reiterated on Twitter, national surveys were only off by about one percentage point, and Hillary Clinton, after all, won the popular vote.
What is most concerning about Trump’s tweets isn’t that he’s wrong on the history of political forecasting. It’s that he’s relentlessly seeking to delegitimize mainstream sources of information—any outlets that don’t help him politically. At the same time, he’s rewarding those that do, propping up fringe media willing to toe the Trumpian line. It’s why his team saves a special seat for Breitbart at his news conferences, and why he’s promoting One America News Network—a small pro-Trump channel that recently hired the president-elect’s former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski. Trust in America’s democratic institutions is eroding, and its incoming leader wants to erode it further.