#polling data

Don’t be distracted by Trump’s lies and three-card monte games with immigration. He's hiding something bigger.

Lucian K. Truscott IV

Jan 27, 2026

Greg Bovino isn’t gone. They moved him back to El Centro, California. Kristi Noem isn’t gone, and she hasn’t atoned for the vicious, ugly lies she told about Renee Good and Alex Pretti. She’s still canoodling with Corey Lewandowski behind her big desk at Homeland Security in Washington D.C. while an assistant steams her cowboy hat so she’ll look good at her next press conference.

Most importantly, Donald Trump hasn’t done anything more than call the Wall Street Journal and make a few noises that people seem to be hoping will show that he “gets it” about the excesses of his ICE and Border Patrol military cosplay thugs.

He doesn’t get it, not even close. The ICE patrols are still terrorizing the streets in Minneapolis and now Portland and Lewiston, Maine. They’re still “going door to door” looking to deport hard working people who own or have rented houses and apartments, gotten jobs, started businesses, attend local churches, and send their children to public schools. Trump hasn’t backed down. All that he has done is to put a temporary halt to doubling down on his authoritarian push against immigrants. He said they would be “reassigning” some federal agents now operating in Minneapolis. Really? When? How many? What city will they terrorize next?

Why is Trump pretending to change his tune? It’s at least in part because of his tanking poll numbers, which just dipped for the first time below 40 percent on the question of immigration. Only thirty-nine percent of Americans now approve of how he is handling immigration, with 53 percent disapproving.

Trump cares about polls. A lot. It comes from his obsession with ratings when his incredibly stilted and stupid TV show was on the air. What Trump really cares about is keeping some sort of action going full tilt in the foreground, so that his problem with Jeffrey Epstein stays in the background. Shoot some more “drug boats” out of the water. Kidnap another South American dictator. Steam a couple of battleships and a carrier along the shore of Iran. Rattle more sabers at Europe. Impose a few more tariffs. He doesn’t care what the action is, he just wants it churning and distracting everyone from what he’s really afraid of.

It was reported a few days ago that work in the office of the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York has ground to a halt while everyone who can keep their eyes open are assigned to redacting the millions of new Epstein files that emerged from somewhere. It’s notable that we haven’t even been told where they came from. It’s also notable that the idea that anything with the name “Epstein” attached to it needs to be redacted before it can be seen by the public.

What does this mean? It means at the very least that all those assistant U.S. attorneys and other workers are Xing out the name of Donald Trump and all his friends from the files. They’re supposed to be “protecting Epstein’s victims,” but what they’re really doing is protecting Epstein’s co-conspirators, all the men who benefitted one way or another from their association with Epstein. He either helped them hide money in the Caribbean to dodge taxes, or he gave them free flights on his jet, which they all jokingly called “The Lolita Express,” or he encouraged them to get “massages” that were available in every one of his homes in New York City, New Mexico, Palm Beach, and on Epstein’s private island.

Remember the number of Epstein’s victims? Let’s put it the way it should be reported: Over one thousand underage girls were sexually abused or raped by Epstein, Ghislane Maxwell, and persons associated with those two. Think of it this way: we don’t even know the number of men who were involved in raping and abusing those girls over the decades that Epstein and his co-conspirators engaged in sex trafficking.

So yes, let’s celebrate, if that is the correct word, the snatches of positive news that have recently been reported. It’s good that Bovino is gone. It’s good that Noem seems to have fallen from Trump’s embrace because she is responsible for having turned loose murderous thugs on the people of an American city. It’s good that Trump appears to have realized that his roundup of anyone whose skin is not white has backfired on him with the public.

But it’s not a victory. Not by a long, long shot. The odious Stephen Miller has not been touched by the scandals surrounding the murders of Good and Pretti. The tactics being employed by ICE and Border Patrol are Miller’s. He is the one who has been screaming every day on Zoom calls to increase the number of arrests, to go after any and all immigrants, not just those with criminal records, and to cover the entire campaign with wholesale lies when things go wrong.

Stephen Miller has been cowering in his West Wing office in the White House and the Fort McNair military quarters he has been permitted to occupy since a woman in Northern Virginia walked past his house and looked at his wife in a manner they alleged was so menacing that she has been investigated by the FBI for stalking. And yet it is Miller who’s really running things on the ground in Minneapolis.

It was reported over the weekend that Miller and White House Chief of Staff Susi Wiles are “unhappy” with Kristi Noem and her paramour Lewandowski. Now, isn’t that cute? The White House is leaking tidbits of gossip about little battles within the administration to obscure the fact that Stephen Miller is supervising the beating and gassing and pepper-spraying and, yes, murdering of civilians in an American city.

The lesson for the day: Don’t try to follow how the White House three-card monte cards are moving, watch what’s going on behind the con men running the game. They’re stealing taxpayers blind to pay for the deportation flights and the concentration camps they’re building and the hotel bills they’re paying for the thousands of thugs who wake up every morning in their Holiday Inn Express rooms and put on their masks and costumes and get in their rented SUV’s and hit the streets and start terrorizing the people who live in Minneapolis and Portland and Lewiston, Maine.

And all the while, they’re concealing what Trump is really panicked about: his name appearing on pages of the Epstein files, or even worse, his smiling face appearing in a photo showing girls who are obviously too young to be hanging around with adult men such as Trump and Epstein and the rest of his pals.

We can’t allow smoke and mirrors and tear gas to divert our attention from either the crimes on the ground in American cities or the crimes in the pages of the Epstein files that we haven’t yet seen. These people are hideous criminals in practically everything they do, most especially Stephen Miller and Donald Trump.

At the 100-day mark—a milestone presidents usually meet with parades of approval—Donald Trump stands almost alone. His approval rating has dropped to 42%, the lowest of any modern president at this point in office, eclipsing even post-crisis presidencies.

Where others found "honeymoon" periods, Trump finds hollowed fields.

Republican loyalty, once ironclad, is softening: only 67% of GOP voters "strongly approve" of his performance, down sharply from the euphoric highs of Inauguration Day. Fractures show most in healthcare, immigration, and economic policies—areas once promised to be the bedrock of his "winning."

Beyond party lines, the American public cites a cocktail of missteps: a failed healthcare repeal, volatile foreign policy decisions, and an unprecedented breach of presidential decorum via Twitter storms.

Political historians warn that early-term impressions often become permanent records. Without a pivot—or a crisis to reset the narrative—Trump risks becoming the first president in decades to lose the country before he ever truly had it.

"The loneliest kind of power," someone once wrote, "is the kind no one believes in."

politics #trump #americanpolitics #100days #politicalanalysis

🎥 For more context : I put together a longer clip on YouTube that dives deeper into the polling data, historical comparisons, and what this could mean for the next election cycles. 👉 Watch it here

by David Litman

CNN has a shaky relationship with polling data, as CAMERA has documented previously. In a previous, admittedly more egregious case, CNN’s Christiane Amanpour appears to have entirely fabricated the existence of polling data that fit her preferred narrative. On July 14, however, CNN’s Abeer Salman took a slightly different track by using existing polling data, but only some of it.

In an article titled “Palestinian leader calls on world to ‘protect us,’ and his people respond with bitter laughter,” Salman reports on the declining popularity of Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas. To her credit, this is a story that needs to be told.

But Salman, who has a history of slanted coverage (and even uncritically publishing an antisemitic cartoon), doesn’t end there. She portrays the story as one in which Palestinians are frustrated that Abbas is not “protecting” them from “increasing Israeli settler violence and frequent, deadly Israeli military incursions…”

In doing so, Salman shifts the story from one of growing Palestinian extremism and violence into one of Palestinian victimhood. The narrative portrays the situation as one in which Palestinians are mocking Abbas’ “calls for peaceful resistance” (a dubious claim itself) not because they are increasingly supportive of violence against Israelis, but because they are victims of Israeli violence.

But the data, including the polling data from Salman’s own source, works against her narrative.

The CNN reporter cites a Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PCPSR) poll, pointing out that “71% were dissatisfied” with Abbas as president and “74% demanded that he resign.”

However, Salman leaves out the other side of the story from those PCPSR polls. As Abbas’ popularity has declined, two other indicators have taken notable and contemporaneous turns: (1) support for the two-state solution has declined; and (2) support for “armed confrontations and intifada” has risen.

Tracking all three questions since March 2015, we see the following trend:

Source: Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research

Shortly after satisfaction with Abbas began dramatically declining (from 37% in 2020 to 32% in 2021, 23% in 2022, and 19% in 2023), support for armed confrontations and intifada” began sharply increasing (from 43% in 2021 to 52% in 2022 and 58% in 2023). Equally important to note is that support for a two-state solution has simultaneously declined in a similarly dramatic fashion (from 40% in 2022 to 27% in 2023).

That is, the story isn’t just one of declining popularity for Abbas. It’s one of greater support for violence and for rejection of living peacefully, side by side with Israel.

While one must always be cautious of reading too much into polling data, as a recent CAMERA study showed, around the same time that polling data began showing these trends, the level of Palestinian violence dramatically surged, jumping from 1,248 attacks in 2020 to 2,063 in 2021 and 2,674 in 2022. And while UN data suggests violence by Israeli settlers has also increased, the data shows quite clearly that settler violence grew more slowly and remains at levels dramatically lower than Palestinian violence, with 358 incidents in 2020, 496 incidents in 2021, and 849 incidents in 2022.

This preempts the suggestion that the growth in support for violence among Palestinians was a response to growing Israeli violence, given that the data shows the surge in violence has been overwhelmingly driven by the Palestinian side.

One other polling point left out: what Palestinians prefer over “peaceful resistance.” While Salman states that many Palestinians mock calls for “peaceful resistance,” she leaves out what the polls show they prefer: “armed struggle.” While the polling question has not been consistently asked over the same period by PCPSR, the March 2023 poll showed Palestinians chose “armed struggle” (54%) over “popular resistance” (21%) as the “most effective” method to end the conflict and achieve statehood (only 18% chose “negotiations”).

More good data around the Hispanic Redshift of 2020 and its future. Its always important to remember how artificial coalitions are - black and hispanic populations in the US face different issues, some shared interests and other conflicting agendas, and events can easily shift around who coalitions with who. 

Per Pew Research:

Per Quinnipiac:

Per Gallup: 

Note: the Quinnipiac poll is the most recent, therefore it is those specific numbers that I have cited. Either way, the general consensus, regardless of specific percentages is, the American people are largely united on these issues and have been for some time.

Didn’t know Kellyanne Conway replaced Paul Manafort!

Mueller's team interviewed Trump’s pollster Tony Fabrizio in February 2018 about Manafort. Hopefully, they asked if Kellyanne or Jared Kushner were involved. Could be a dumper year for Depends!

“Sharing polling data means you’re working together. Conspiring. Making decisions together. Working to destroy the competition,” David Measer 

Then, things got interesting when Measer pointed out that Manafort’s replacement, Kellyanne Conway, would have been in a position to know about the campaign’s operation targeting specific voters with detailed polling data

“You know who knows a lot about this? @KellyannePolls — someone should ask her,” Measer said.

@dmesser Twitter account is protected!