The details of this have been made public, and you can say it is just another of the endless examples of the joint mutually reinforcing propaganda of Trump and Fox News, but let’s pause for a moment to take stock before we all become completely numb.
Lou Dobbs “reads” the outcome of a legitimate poll by Georgetown University, and forms the belief that Trump’s approval rating is 55%. This alone ought to be a seismic shock to any half-sentient creature. Trump’s actual approval rating started at 46% and has never, ever gone that high again. It tends to top out at about 44% from time to time, and then drift down. The only polling outfit that shows anything else is Rasmussen, which (not co-incidentally) is also the sole polling outfit now using a “likely voter” screen, meaning they can more or less pick and choose whose responses to count in the final total. Also not co-incidentally, Rasmussen predicted that the Republicans would poll at +1 in the 2018 mid-terms, whereas the actual result was -8. That is, Rasmussen was off by 9%, in the GOP direction. And now they also regularly show Trump’s approval level at about 9% higher than everyone else in the field. And even with all that, Rasmussen never got Trump’s approval up to 55%.
So anyone who thought that a non-Rasmussen poll was giving Trump a 55% approval rating ought to have been completely shocked and astounded, and asked how that could possibly have happened. But that thought never even occurs to Mensa genius Lou Dobbs. If he had paused to take a second look at that Georgetown poll, he would have noticed that it really put Trump’s disapproval at 55%, and his approval at 43%. But no, he just goes out on his show an announces that Trump’s approval has hit this unprecedented high.
Next, the infant in the White House sees this, and it also never even occurs to him that the number cannot possibly be right, and that he ought to check into it. Instead, he simply tweets out a link to Dobbs with the triumphant comment “Great news! #MAGA”. A tweet that remains on his feed even now, long after the claim was retracted by Dobbs. And how many of those who live off Trump’s tweets still believe it?
You would never have thought it could get this bad. Such an event would never have been forgotten if Obama had done it. But at this point, with Trump, it is hardly noticed.
This should never be normalized. The bar for acceptable behavior should not be allowed to drop this low.