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Good morning. Martin here, delighted to be on deck for the final morning of another week in Trump’s America that has felt more like most of a year. Here’s hoping you have fine weekend plans lined up. You’ve earned it.
In today’s ‘First Draft,’ we consider a truly terrible AP-NORC poll for Donald Trump’s 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 Trump’s 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 Netanyahu’s genocidal machine.
Pause for breath. Read on.
‘The Best Numbers’
With the midterms looming, Donald Trump is all in on the “numbers.” He’s also high on his own supply.
In his alarmingly yet familiarly batshit interview with Time, asked about polling that has “never been lower,” the 80-year-old said: “They’re fake numbers. I would beat anybody running today by 20 points. Your numbers that you have are fake. The pollsters are corrupt. They’re almost as corrupt as the writers.”
Later on Thursday, landing in Texas, he said: “We have the best numbers of any president in history. The one thing we don’t do is we don’t get a fair shake from the media. They don’t report the numbers.”
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.