Back in March, Donald Trump got some bad news. According to internal campaign polling, he was losing to Joe Biden in many of the key states he needs to win, data that ran counter to his deeply held belief that he is the most popular president in U.S. history who “the people” desperately want to serve more than two terms. So he did what any narcissistic, pathological liar would do: He instructed aides to deny the results and insisted that the media is actually suppressing polls that show him mopping the floor with Biden. Then, when details from those polls leaked to the media, he fired the polling firms whose polls made him look—to borrow one of his favorite words— like a loser, even though, according to Trump, said polls “don’t even exist.”

On Sunday, NBC News reported that the Trump campaign has “decided to purge” a number of its pollsters, a group that the New York Times says includes Kellyanne Conway’s old firm, the Polling Company, and firms owned by Adam Geller, who previously worked for Chris Christie, and Michael Baselice, a pollster for former California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s not clear if Trump aides ever identified the source of the leak, but campaign manager Brad Parscale reportedly hopes to “shrink the circle of outside operatives who have access to information” that could make the president look bad.

Trump has taken a typically ad hoc approach to burying the news, making himself look all the worse in the process. Last week during a press conference with Polish President Andrzej Duda, Trump claimed that, actually, he was “winning in every single state we’ve polled.” Later, during his now infamous interview with ABC News, Trump told George Stephanopoulos that the leaked polls “don’t exist” and that he “just had a meeting with somebody that’s a pollster” and he’s “winning everywhere, so I don’t know what you’re talking about.” A day later, Parscale confirmed the existence of polls showing Trump losing to Biden by 10 points in Wisconsin, 16 points in Pennsylvania, and 7 points in Florida. But, Parscale insisted, channeling Trump, nobody should take the campaign’s internal polling seriously.

“These leaked numbers are ancient, in campaign terms, from months-old polling that began in March before two major events had occurred: the release of the summary of the Mueller report exonerating the president, and the beginning of the Democrat candidates defining themselves with their far-left policy message,” Parscale said in a statement. “Since then, we have seen huge swings in the president’s favor across the 17 states we have polled, based on the policies now espoused by the Democrats,” he continued. “The president is correct that we have no current polls against defined Democrats—at all—that show him losing in any of the states we have tested.” As the Times notes, the supposedly positive new numbers from the campaign involved a survey wherein people polled were only asked if they supported Trump “after first describing the Democrats in negative terms, according to two people familiar with the data.”

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