President Trump should realize that he sounds dumb complaining about polls, given that he beat them all just two years ago.

“The polls” say the exact same thing now that they did then: that Trump’s set to lose the election.

On Election Day in 2016, Nate Silver was giving Hillary Clinton a 71% chance of becoming the next president. The New York Times was estimating that there was a 90% chance.

Those odds were based on the same polls that now show Trump losing in a matchup with Joe Biden, should he become the Democratic nominee.

Trump on Monday tweeted that it’s only the “Fake Polls” showing him behind. What’s the opposite of “very stable genius”?

What he should be saying about the polls is, So what? I beat them in 2016, and I’ll beat them again.

It’s still unclear why polling was so off during the 2016 election. Some of it surely has to do with polling methods, which still largely rely on phone calls to landlines, excluding thousands, if not millions of people who no longer even use landlines. There were also scores of people who came out to vote when they were expected not to, given that they sat out past elections.

But there’s one factor when it comes to Trump that no poll will ever be able to register: the tendency of a substantial number of his supporters to lie.

The American Psychological Association released a study in May of 1,000 American voters who said after the 2016 election that they voted for a different candidate than the one they had publicly said they would. Among the study’s participants, 27% secretly voted for Clinton, but an astounding 54% voted for Trump.

The authors of the study said that there were three reasons for people to lie about the candidate they ended up voting for: First, a desire to maintain their reputation among those close to them; second, fear of being ostracized from social circles; and third, aversion to potential conflict with others who might disapprove.

Who can blame anyone for keeping their intention to vote for Trump a secret? Since 2015, he’s been constantly called a racist by the national media. The Democratic Party’s nominee in 2016 called his supporters "irredeemable." Who wants to upset their friends and family, let alone strangers, by being associated with that? Most people don’t like spending their time in disagreement, argument, and conflict. It's easier to lie and keep things nice.

Nobody knows if polls right now are an accurate reading of the electorate. What we do know is that when the question on the poll is about supporting Trump, they have been very wrong before.