Trump Flubs Approval Rating in Evening Tweet

It's routine for President Trump's tweets to garner attention, but this one is grabbing headlines because of what seems to be a goof. "Over 90% approval rating for your all time favorite (I hope) President within the Republican Party and 52% overall," he tweeted Sunday night, and one of those figures isn't quite right. He finished: "This despite all of the made up stories by the Fake News Media trying endlessly to make me look as bad and evil as possible. Look at the real villains please!" The Hill reports that a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll did indeed find a 90% approval rating among Republicans.

But the Week looks at a variety of polls, none of which place his overall rating at higher than 46%. The assumption is that Trump grabbed the wrong number: That WSJ/NBC News poll found a 52% disapproval rating; the approval rating was 44%. In its report on the poll, NBC News does observe that Trump's approval rating "remains virtually unchanged" (one pollster called it "remarkably stable") even after Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen's big day on Aug. 21: Its latest numbers come from an Aug. 22-25 survey; in its Aug. 18-22 survey, the disapproval rating was 51%, and approval, 46%. The poll also found that 56% of voters believe Trump has not been "honest and truthful" about Robert Mueller's probe.