Trump’s approval rating is sky high. Are most Americans fools for liking him — or has Australia’s propaganda press been covertly conditioning us to loathe the US president?
Here’s a challenge for Australian readers: list all the major Aussie news outlets that are sympathetic towards President Donald Trump.
Your list will likely begin and end with Sky News Australia — which at most accounts for 5 per cent of the nation’s media landscape.
In other words, if you’re an Australian, there’s a 95 per cent chance the news you digest is conditioning you — whether subtly or overtly — to viscerally recoil at the mere mention of Donald Trump’s name.
This contrived contempt for the US leader breeds all sorts of faulty assumptions — like Trump is 95 per cent evil, or 95 per cent of what I hear about him must be true, or 95 per cent of the world sees the US President as a joke, or 95 per cent of Americans secretly hate him too.
Sorry to break it to you, but none of that reflects reality. The polls coming out of the United States tell an entirely different story.
Not only did Trump dominate in last November’s election — winning every battleground state comfortably, picking up 312 electoral college votes (far more than the 270 needed to win), and becoming the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years — but his approval ratings have remained at historic highs since he took office.
Bear in mind that Trump staged his political comeback, not in a vacuum, but with the entire American media ecosystem decrying him as a narcissist, felon, bully and fascist — basically, Hitler reincarnate.
Indeed, so dehumanising was their coverage that Trump was forced to dodge not one but two assassination attempts on his way back to the White House.
What Do the Polls Say?
Early indicators that the American public no longer believed the ‘Orange Man Bad’ framing and were quite happy with their pick, thank you very much, was when CNN was forced to admit, just days after Trump’s inauguration, that his net approval ratings were the highest they’d ever been.
This would be the first of many mea culpas for the legacy media.
Just over a week later, a CBS News poll found that Trump was enjoying a 53% overall job approval rating — and that a whopping 70% of Americans felt Trump was doing what he promised on the campaign trail.
The same survey revealed 59% support for Trump’s plans to mass-deport illegal immigrants, along with high numbers of Americans affirming their Commander-in-Chief as tough (69%), energetic (63%), focussed (60%) and effective (58%).
Then last week, a Napolitan News Service survey found that President Trump’s job approval was as high as 55%, with just 43% disapproving.
In reporting on the results, the pollster explained, “Since winning the election last November, approval of Donald Trump’s performance has stayed within two points of 53% every single week but one” — when “he bounced to 57% during his inauguration week”.
Trump’s persistent popularity has spawned an entire genre of tortured headlines, like Vice’s ‘Why Trump remains popular, despite all the chaos’; the ABC scraping the barrel with: ‘Donald Trump enjoys massive support, but some of his voters are already turning on Elon Musk’; Salon whining: ‘Donald Trump’s chaos strategy: Why Americans continue to fall for his game of distraction’, and Politico grasping at straws with: ‘How Trump Could Snatch a Third Term — Despite the 22nd Amendment’.
Drilling down on the reasons for Trump’s high approval ratings, a Marquette Law School poll last week uncovered solid support for many of Trump’s signature policies, including:
- 59% support for his declaration of a national emergency at the southern border
- 60% support for his plans to expand oil and gas production
- 60% support for his deporting illegal immigrants
- 63% support for his recognition of only two sexes, male and female
In fact, a New York Times/Ipsos survey found that as many as 79% of Americans believe men should not be allowed to participate in women’s sports — including 94% of Republicans and a staggering 67% of Democrats. This data suggests that Trump’s executive order banning men from women’s sports could be the most popular thing he has ever done.
Other Data To Consider
Polls measuring Trump’s popularity and policies only tell part of the story. There are other clear signs that he is in step with the will of the American people.
Polling firm Rasmussen Reports — one of the only outlets to accurately predict Trump’s 2024 victory — reveals that more Americans believe their country is on the “right track” (47%) than going the “wrong direction” (46%).
While this may not sound like an impressive statistic, it’s the first time in 20 years of asking the question that Rasmussen has detected a net positive result. In September of last year, for example, only 28% of Americans felt their country was on the right track.
“I never predicted anything like this would happen,” Rasmussen’s chief pollster Mark Mitchell remarked on the finding. “This could be a fundamental reformation of all kind of politics,” he added.
There is also Gallup data showing that nearly half of all Democrats — 45% — believe their party needs to become more moderate. That number has grown by 11 percentage points since 2021. By contrast, the number of Republicans who believe their party needs to moderate has remained steady.
One final consideration is how President Trump’s popularity is faring against other world leaders.
A Morning Consult poll conducted in late January found that Trump’s approval rating is one of the best in the world. The only heads of state to rank higher were the leaders of India, Mexico, Argentina and Switzerland.
What if We’re Living in a False Reality?
Confronted with these facts, Australian observers must make a choice: double down on the slanted reporting of media elites, or think for yourself.
But beware of the implications of both.
If the legacy media is correct, and Trump is evil personified, most of America’s 350 million inhabitants are evil too, or at best maniacally deceived.
Meanwhile, we here in Australia, 16,000 kilometres away, have a better read on the situation than Americans on the ground who have endured the chaos of 11 million illegal immigrants flooding in through open borders, the weaponisation of the justice system against conservatives, and the tailspin of an economy US$36 trillion in debt.
Here’s the other possibility: the world being presented to you on the nightly news and in the tabloid papers is an illusion.
Think about it. These are the same outlets that:
- Peddle the chemical and surgical castration of children as “gender-affirming care”
- Covered up Joe Biden’s cognitive decline
- Uncritically push Net Zero policies that have sent power prices soaring
- Told you only conspiracy theorists believe Covid-19 came from the Wuhan lab, despite the findings of US intelligence
- Dismissed the Hunter Biden laptop story as “Russian disinformation”
- Painted the “Yes” campaign for the Voice referendum as unstoppable—until Australians overwhelmingly rejected it
- Framed January 6 as the darkest day in American history but the Black Lives Matter riots which killed dozens of people as “mostly peaceful protests”
- Smear anything that threatens their authority as “misinformation” and “disinformation”
There’s a reason I call it the propaganda press.
If the legacy media has misled you this often, isn’t it worth asking whether they’re doing the same with Trump?
Recall that, before Donald Trump’s upset victory at the 2016 election, he was a celebrated figure in American culture.
As a successful businessman, television personality and media darling, Trump enjoyed widespread admiration throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, appearing on shows like ‘The Apprentice,’ making cameo roles in films, and being referenced positively in pop culture, including hundreds of hip hop songs that portrayed him as a symbol of success and glamour.
But as soon as he entered the White House, where he posed a threat to the Democrat-media machine, the same elites who once adored Trump turned on him with a vengeance, launching a relentless campaign of criticism and memory-holing his genuine appeal to everyday Americans.
Lacking originality, Australia’s media has simply parroted what they’ve seen in the American press.
The biggest clue that Trump isn’t half as bad as they claim? Their relentless efforts to make you believe it.
Turn off the TV. Cancel your newspaper subscriptions. And my best advice: open a free account on X, where you’ll have access to unfiltered events as they happen, and a genuinely diverse cross-section of political commentary.
Then, enjoy the experience of being un-brainwashed — and thank me later.
Republished with thanks to The Daily Declaration. Image via Wikimedia Commons.
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