Trump Briefly Appears to Acknowledge His Poll Numbers Aren’t Great, Says ‘I Don’t Know’ Why

President Donald Trump briefly appeared to acknowledge that his handling of the economy is not polling well, telling NBC’s Tom Llamas on Wednesday that he doesn’t know why that is the case.

Trump spoke to Llamas in a pre-Super Bowl interview in the Oval Office, where the NBC Nightly News anchor asked him about the poor polling response to his immigration enforcement tactics.

“Well, I don’t believe the polls for one thing, because how can you not have– I saw a poll on the border where I’m at 55%, okay?” said Trump.

The president later expressed disbelief over the number.

“How can I be at 55% when everybody agrees that the border is totally, beautifully closed and nobody’s coming in unless they come in legally, etc, etc. It couldn’t be better. I should be at 100%.”

He continued his discussion on polling with Llamas:

TRUMP: I don’t believe the polls. And some polls, I mean, I could show you polls where I’m polling at 69% popularity and some polls where– I have one at 71–

LLAMAS: We’ll ask the White House to share that with us.

TRUMP: Well, wait a minute, 71%. And then I have polls where I’m at 44% and 42%. The polls are almost dishonest, almost as dishonest as some of the reporters themselves. I’m getting very good polls. I’m getting very good polls on crime prevention, on law and order, and on the border. And I’m getting, starting to get great polls on teh economy, which I think is our biggest–

LLAMAS: The polls on the economy aren’t– they’re not great.

TRUMP: They should be great.

LLAMAS: They should be, so why aren’t they if you believe that?

TRUMP: I don’t know. I don’t know.

The president has consistently refused to acknowledge any negative polling, going so far as to sue pollster Ann Selzer for a 2024 poll that showed him trailing Vice President Kamala Harris in Iowa during the lead-up to the election.

A new Harvard/Harris poll reported that a majority of Americans now say he’s doing a worse job than former President Joe Biden did, including 63% of voters who said the current state of the economy was mostly due to the Trump administration rather than Biden, and 53% who claimed the economy was worse than it was when Biden was president.

The president notably did acknowledge some less-than-ideal polling, specifically on the economy, in December of last year.

“When will I get credit for having created, with No Inflation, perhaps the Greatest Economy in the History of our Country?” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “When will people understand what is happening? When will Polls reflect the Greatness of America at this point in time, and how bad it was just one year ago?”

Watch above via NBC News.

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