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Good morning. Martin here, delighted to be on deck for the final morning of another week in Trumpâs America that has felt more like most of a year. Hereâs hoping you have fine weekend plans lined up. Youâve earned it.
In todayâs âFirst Draft,â we consider a truly terrible AP-NORC poll for Donald Trumpâs and his reaction to it, which was to rant about numbers, repeatedly, without the slightest concession to his deeply troubled reality. There was also a long interview with Time that may somehow have managed to be Trumpâs most unhinged yet, and a report from CNN on a stunning conflict of interest involving Trump envoy Jared Kushner, the so-called Gaza peace process, and an Israeli company helping fund Benjamin Netanyahuâs genocidal machine.
Pause for breath. Read on.
âThe Best Numbersâ
With the midterms looming, Donald Trump is all in on the ânumbers.â Heâs also high on his own supply.
In his alarmingly yet familiarly batshit interview with Time, asked about polling that has ânever been lower,â the 80-year-old said: âTheyâre fake numbers. I would beat anybody running today by 20 points. Your numbers that you have are fake. The pollsters are corrupt. Theyâre almost as corrupt as the writers.â
Later on Thursday, landing in Texas, he said: âWe have the best numbers of any president in history. The one thing we donât do is we donât get a fair shake from the media. They donât report the numbers.â
The problem, of course, is that the media does report the numbers, from and about all sorts of things but particularly those produced by public polling. And those numbers have never been worse.
On Thursday, AP-NORC released a new poll. It was an absolute stinker for Trump, and the media duly reported it.