President Donald Trump's is extending his run of baseless boasts about his popularity among Americans — with an unsupported claim that nearly six in 10 approve of his job performance.
The evidence-free assertion essentially reversed recent poll results that show nearly the same number actually giving a thumbs-down to their nation's longtime fact-challenged, 80-year-old leader.
Trump wrote on social media Sunday that he had a "59 percent Approval Rating," adding: "Prices coming down along with the lowering of oil and gas. Thank you!"
The president didn't cite a source for his purported public support, which the Real Clear Polling website pegged Monday at an average of 41 percent, with 56.5 percent disapproving.
RCP doesn't show any individual rating higher than 45 percent this month.
Those numbers are nearly identical to those compiled by polling analyst Nate Silver's Silver Bulletin, which puts the average approval/disaproval ratio at 40.1-56.5, with the highest individual approval rating this month at 47 percent.
Trump's claims about prices "coming down" also ran counter to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation numbers, which showed that the Consumer Price Index rose 0.5 percent in May, nudging up the annual rate to 4.2 percent.
And the average price of a gallon of gas rose more than 5 cents over the past week, according to AAA, which on Thursday blamed the upward trajectory on "volatility" in the Strait of Hormuz due to the war against Iran that Trump launched on Feb. 28.
Trump's latest approval claim followed a social media post from last month in which he cited an outlier survey that showed him with a 50 percent approval rating and said that unspecified “other polls” put it at 65 percent “and more.”
It also came after a series of gaffes he made during his trip last week to the NATO summit in Turkey, where he mistakenly referred to Iran as "the Islamic Republic of Japan."
Trump also flubbed the abbreviation for the nuclear agreement with Iran that he cancelled during his first term, referring to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action as the "JPCOC" instead of JCPOA.
And while sitting next to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, he oddly asked reporters if anyone had a "question for President Putin."
After scattered chuckles and chatter from the audience, Trump apparently tried to cover up the mistake by saying: "Not Zelensky, Putin. What would you like to ask him? Because I'm going to ask him that question."
During Trump’s first term, The Washington Post famously tallied 30,573 false or misleading claims he made, with the daily average rising from six during his first year in office to 39 during his final year.
In 2018, George Mason University professor James Piffner, an expert on the American presidency, wrote that the lies Trump told “differ significantly from previous presidential lies” and that the “most significant” were “egregious false statements that are demonstrably contrary to well-known facts.”
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