… Trump himself used to celebrate polls, lest we forget. During the Republican primary in 2015 and 2016, he surged to the front of polling and would celebrate new numbers at the beginning of his rallies. He’d literally pull poll numbers out of his pocket and describe his front-runner status to cheering crowds. As those same pollsters then declared that he was trailing Hillary Clinton in the general election — and then accurately pegged his popular-vote loss — polls became a nuisance or a threat. As recently as Monday morning, polls were “fake” if they showed him trailing possible Democratic nominees in the 2020 election — a response, it seems, to a poll released over the weekend showing him trailing former vice president Joe Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and in ties with a number of other possible Democratic candidates.
That poll was from Fox News, not generally an outlet that Trump paints with his “fake news” brush. This comes after a period in which Trump and his team denied the existence of polls conducted by their own campaign showing Trump trailing Biden — denials that were undercut significantly when ABC News obtained the actual poll numbers. So the denial shifted: Those polls were old and there were new ones that showed Trump doing quite well. CONT.
Philip Bump, Washington Post