“The same people who did the phony election polls, and were so wrong, are now doing approval rating polls. They are rigged just like before,” Donald Trump tweeted. | Getty Trump blasts polls showing him to be least popular incoming president in modern history

Polls showing Donald Trump with a historically low approval rating for an incoming president-elect are not to be trusted, Trump himself wrote on Twitter Tuesday morning.

After all, he wrote, they’re the same polls that suggested for months he would lose last year’s presidential election.


“The same people who did the phony election polls, and were so wrong, are now doing approval rating polls. They are rigged just like before,” Trump wrote on Twitter Tuesday morning.

The post comes on the same morning that two polls, one from CNN and another conducted jointly by ABC News and The Washington Post, showed Trump to be the least popular incoming president in modern history. Trump’s approval rating in the CNN poll released Tuesday sat at just 40 percent, 44 points below the 84 percent that President Barack Obama took office with in 2009.

Just 40 percent of those surveyed by The Washington Post and ABC News said they held a favorable opinion of Trump, by far the lowest of any incoming president dating back at least to President Jimmy Carter’s 1977 inauguration. President Obama entered the White House in 2009 with a 79 percent favorable rating.

Rep. Sean Duffy (R-Wis.), a vice chairman of the Trump transition team’s executive committee, said Tuesday that the president-elect’s regular friction with the press has taken a toll on his poll numbers, but that his popularity is likely to rebound.

“What's actually happening here is the public fight that Mr. Trump is having with CNN and other media groups is taking some skin off his poll numbers and it's gone down,” Duffy said on CNN’s “New Day.”

