The first year of Donald Trump’s second term was dreadful in a great many ways, including the public’s reaction to the Republican president’s numerous failures and scandals. Indeed, as 2025 came to an end, Gallup’s latest national poll found his approval rating sinking to just 36%.

Writing for The New York Times, Steven Rattner noted soon after, “Negative economic sentiment contributed significantly to Mr. Trump’s poll numbers. At 36 percent, his approval rating is the lowest of any president at the end of his first year in the past five decades, lower than it was at this point in his first term and lower even than Mr. Biden’s 40 percent when he left office.”

Confronted with numbers like these, the president has plenty of options. Trump could say that he expects to see his standing improve in the coming months. He could argue that he doesn’t consider public opinion research to be especially important since he can’t run for a third term anyway. He might even adopt a more long-term perspective and insist that he expects to be vindicated by history.

But Trump isn’t doing any of those things. Instead, he’s apparently decided to reward himself with a new, made-up approval rating that he prefers over reality. The Hill reported:

President Trump claimed Tuesday that his ‘real’ approval rating is at 64 percent, despite polls showing it is below 50 percent.

‘The polls are rigged even more than the writers,’ Trump said in a late-night Truth Social post. ‘The real number is 64%, and why not, our Country is “hotter” than ever before.’

To be sure, there is some variation among the recent surveys. Gallup found only 36% of the public approves of Trump’s job performance, but Quinnipiac University put the number at 40%. The latest Reuters/Ipsos poll found the president with 39% support, while the latest Marist poll put the number at 38%.

But the grand total of publicly available national polls, conducted at any time in 2025, which showed Trump with a 64% approval rating is zero.

What I find especially amusing about this, however, is the familiarity of the circumstances. Just one month into his second term, Trump also decided to give himself fictional approval ratings, telling an audience in mid-February that he had seen nonexistent polls showing his public support at 71% and 69%.

Those surveys had no basis in reality, and it’s certainly weird to see an American president giving himself generous approval ratings based on data that only exists in his imagination. But let’s not lose sight of the trajectory: Based on Trump’s own telling, his imaginary approval rating slipped several points over the course of 2025.