Victor Davis Hanson Just Shattered the Media’s Favorite Lie About Trump

For years, they’ve used fake polls to manipulate public opinion and crush his momentum.

Lately, the media’s been pushing a familiar narrative: Trump is tanking in the polls.

But Victor Davis Hanson says that story doesn’t hold up—and once you see what’s behind the numbers, it starts to look a lot more like propaganda than polling.

So where did it all come from?

“We've touched on polls before,” Hanson said, “but I don't think I've seen anything quite as egregious in pollsters' bias as recently when they... purportedly surveyed the first 100 days of Donald Trump and the public reaction.”

Headlines immediately screamed: Worst first 100 days in history.

Trump’s approval supposedly dropped from 52 to 41 percent.

But as Hanson pointed out, none of that lined up with reality.

“The economic news was pretty good,” he explained.

Trump has been racking up the wins:

“Job growth was just spectacular—over 170,000 jobs. Inflation was down. Energy prices were down. Corporate profits were up. There was a movement on the trade question. Ukraine, still—there was no bad news except the controversy and chaos of a counterrevolution.”

So why were the polls painting such a grim picture?

Hanson believes the goal wasn’t to reflect public opinion—it was to steer it.

“What were the pollsters trying to tell us,” he asked, “or were they trying to manipulate us? I think it’s the latter.”

He pointed to analysis from Larry Kudlow, who found that top polls—like those from The New York Times and The Washington Post—deliberately underrepresented Trump voters.

“They were deliberately not counting people who surveyed that they were Trump voters in 2024,” Hanson said.

“That was half the country.”

Even worse:

“They were only polling about a third,”

“Think of that. A third of the people that said they voted for Trump, they polled—not half. So of course the results were going to be disputed or suspect.”

And this isn’t the first time.

Hanson reminded us that pollsters have repeatedly missed the mark—in 2016, 2020, and again in 2024.

“They said they had learned their lessons. And they were way off in 2024.”

It all comes down to artificial leads.

Hanson doesn’t chalk this up to sloppy methods or innocent mistakes. He believes it’s deliberate.

“Liberal pollsters—and that’s the majority—believe that if they create artificial leads for their Democratic candidates, it creates greater fundraising and momentum.”

It’s a psychological game.

“Kind of the herd mentality,”

“‘Oh. Trump is down by six. I don’t want to vote for him then. He won’t win.’ That’s the type of thing that they want to create.”

One poll in particular stood out as the worst offender.

Hanson explained:

“The most egregious of all these polls was the NPR, PBS, Marist poll,” Hanson said.

“They have Donald Trump just very unpopular after 100 days.”

He reminded viewers that this same poll—funded by the now-defunded Corporation for Public Broadcasting—was the one that came out the night before the 2024 election.

It claimed Kamala Harris would win by four points.

“They said it was beyond the margin of error.”

“And one of the pollsters said it’s her race to lose.”

“She lost by a point and a half,”

“They were five and a half points off. Did they apologize? No.”

Even worse, he said, the Harris campaign knew the public polling was wrong.

“David Plouffe… just recently came out and said, ‘We had all these inside polls we never disclosed, but not one of them—not one of them—had Harris ever ahead of Trump.’”

And that’s because internal polls don’t lie.

“You pay somebody to tell you the truth,” Hanson said.

“Nothing will get you fired and lose income quicker than to lie about a poll so that your candidate will be happy and rely on your false information.”

“They knew the whole time——that 15 of those 20 polls, 19 polls that all had Harris winning the election, they were all false.”

And here’s where it all comes together.

According to Hanson, the only polls that got it right were the ones with nothing to prove—just data to report.

“Mark Penn was very accurate,” he said.

“He’s a Democratic pollster. But especially the Rasmussen poll, Insider Advantage, and the Trafalgar poll—they joined together and they had a 100-day survey.”

“Rasmussen, each day of the 100-day period—had Trump ahead by anywhere from two to three points. And they were the most accurate.”

Yet the media ignored those numbers and declared Trump’s presidency a disaster.

“No—he’s polling very well.”

“Because the pollsters that indicate that people support him are the only pollsters that have any reputation after this decade-long polling disaster.”

In the end, Hanson said, the story wasn’t about public opinion at all. It was about power.

“They were effectively in league with the Democratic candidate to create momentum,” he said, “rather than adhere to a spirit of professionalism and honor.”