President Donald Trump has made an unsupported claim that his job approval rating stands at 59 per cent, a figure directly contradicted by recent polling averages. Writing on social media on Sunday, Trump asserted the high approval rating and credited himself with falling prices, despite evidence to the contrary.
The Real Clear Polling website shows an average approval rating of 41 per cent for Trump, with 56.5 per cent disapproving. No individual poll in the RCP average has shown a rating higher than 45 per cent this month. Similarly, analyst Nate Silver's Silver Bulletin records an average approval of 40.1 per cent and disapproval of 56.5 per cent, with the highest individual rating at 47 per cent.
Trump's claim that prices are "coming down" is also at odds with official data. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the Consumer Price Index rose 0.5 per cent in May, pushing the annual inflation rate to 4.2 per cent. Meanwhile, the average price of a gallon of petrol increased by more than five cents over the past week, according to the AA, which attributed the rise to volatility in the Strait of Hormuz linked to the war against Iran launched by Trump on 28 February.
The president's latest boast follows a series of gaffes during his trip to the NATO summit in Turkey last week. He mistakenly referred to Iran as "the Islamic Republic of Japan" and flubbed the abbreviation for the Iran nuclear deal, calling it the "JPCOC" instead of JCPOA. While sitting next to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, he asked reporters if anyone had a "question for President Putin," then attempted to cover the error by saying he would ask Putin that question himself.
During his first term, The Washington Post documented 30,573 false or misleading claims made by Trump, with the daily average rising from six in his first year to 39 in his final year. In 2018, George Mason University professor James Piffner noted that Trump's lies "differ significantly from previous presidential lies," with the most significant being "egregious false statements demonstrably contrary to well-known facts."
