Trump fires off post accusing Fox News of 'criminal offense' over plummeting poll numbers

Donald Trump on Monday renewed his attack on polling operations as his approval ratings continue to plummet, this time even roping in conservative stalwarts like Fox News and the Wall Street Journal.

Throughout his second term, the president has consistently argued that stories and poll results that paint him in an overtly negative light are "fake." While this has been a common tactic over the course of his entire political career, more recently, he has started claiming that these stories and polls should be criminal acts, a move that would violate the Constitution's protections for freedom of speech and freedom of the press.

In his Truth Social post from Monday, he reiterated these assertions and argued that his false claim that he won the 2020 election proves the current polling wrong.

"Fake and Fraudulent Polling should be, virtually, a criminal offense," Trump's post read. "As an example, all of the Anti Trump Media that covered me during the 2020 Election showed Polls that were knowingly wrong. They knew what they were doing, trying to influence the Election, but I won in a Landslide, including winning the Popular Vote, all 7 of the 7 Swing States, the Electoral College was a route [sic], and 2,750 Counties to 525."

He continued: "You can’t do much better than that, and yet if people examined The Failing New York Times, ABC Fake News, NBC Fake News, CBS Fake News, Low Ratings CNN, or the now defunct MSDNC, Polls were all fraudulent, and bore nothing even close to the final results. Something has to be done about Fraudulent Polling. Even the Polls of FoxNews and The Wall Street Journal have been, over the years, terrible! There are great Pollsters that called the Election right, but the Media does not want to use them in any way, shape, or form. Isn’t it sad what has happened to American Journalism, but I am going to do everything possible to keep this Polling SCAM from moving forward!"

Despite Trump's claim in the post, the left-leaning news network MSNBC is not defunct, but recently rebranded as MS NOW.

While conservative outlets like Fox News have generally been known to publish more flattering polls of Trump, his sagging popularity has proven too much for these polls to overcome. In November, a survey from the network found the president's approval was at its lowest point on record.

Trump's latest round of grievance over negative polling appears to have been brought on by the most recent poll from the New York Times and Sienna College, which found that approval rating was down to 40 percent, a three-point drop since their last poll. It also found that over two-thirds of respondents felt the country was not better off than it was a year ago, while a little over half said that Trump's policies were actively making life less affordable, the latter representing the biggest issue on voters' minds heading into the 2026 midterms.

Lashing out against the results, Trump added the poll to his defamation lawsuit against the Times. In September, a judge tossed out the original suit for being too long and taking too many pages to get to its actual allegations, accusing the administration of using the filing as a platform lob more abusive language at the paper. Trump's legal team refiled the following month.

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