President Donald Trump is taking his grievances about low approval ratings to the courtroom, suing a poll that shows his popularity plummeting.
On Thursday, Trump announced via Truth Social that he was expanding his lawsuit against The New York Times to include the paper’s polling operation, specifically the Times/Siena poll, which paints a much less flattering picture of the president than he prefers.
“The Times Siena Poll, which is always tremendously negative to me, especially just before the Election of 2024, where I won in a Landslide, will be added to my lawsuit against The Failing New York Times,” Trump wrote. He doubled down: “Fake Polls on the Economy, on the Border, on just about everything, are ridiculous and dangerous. The REAL Polls have been GREAT, but they refuse to print them.”
Trump first sued the Times in September for $15 million, claiming the paper tried to sabotage his election campaign and smear him as a businessman. That effort quickly hit a wall. Four days later, a federal judge in Florida threw it out, calling the filing “improper and impermissible.”
Unbowed, Trump’s team refiled a trimmed-down version a month later, cutting out the more extravagant praise for his own 2024 victory — including the line calling it “the greatest personal and political achievement in American history.”
Now, he’s coming for polls themselves. The Times/Siena survey in question, conducted alongside Siena University, had Trump and Kamala Harris tied at 48 percent during the final stretch of the 2024 campaign. Even after debate flops, assassination attempts, and hundreds of millions in ads, the numbers barely moved — until Trump’s eventual win in all seven battleground states, thanks largely to working-class voters responding to his promises on immigration and cost-of-living issues.
But the latest release is far less forgiving. It shows 56 percent of voters disapprove of Trump’s performance, with most saying he’s focused on the wrong issues. Unsurprisingly, Trump isn’t buying it.
“Something has to be done about Fake Polls! They are truly OUT OF CONTROL,” he wrote. “We have the Greatest Economy in the History of our Country, we have the Strongest Border in History, nobody has ever done a job like I have done, and they have me in the low 40s. The Democrats destroyed Healthcare, I’m trying to fix it, and they give me FAKE low numbers.”
Trump does, however, know how to pick and choose polls that flatter him. Speaking at the World Economic Forum on Wednesday, he claimed two pollsters told him: “Sir, George Washington & Abraham Lincoln, if they came back and ran as president and Vice President, they couldn’t beat you.”
The Times lawsuit is just the tip of Trump’s media-targeting iceberg. He has also sued The Wall Street Journal over a story about a birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein, settled a $16 million defamation case with Paramount/CBS, and filed suits against The Des Moines Register and pollster Ann Selzer after an Iowa poll showing him underwater with voters.
For Trump, it seems, numbers that hurt his ego are now actionable offenses — and any poll showing he’s out of favor risks ending up in a courtroom.