Trump said that “SOMETHING MUST BE DONE” about polls showing his strong disapproval ratings.
Page A3From§Eachthe matinee edition — 31 August 2026
Trump asks FCC to punish critical outlets; his party asks courts for cheaper campaign airtime.
As it ran on the front
Look, the President asking the FCC to look into news organizations publishing what he calls bad polling numbers is not — and I want to be careful here — it is not about punishing anybody. It's about accuracy. Numbers matter. If a poll is wrong, the public deserves to know it's wrong, and the natural regulatory body to determine whether a poll is wrong is — well, the FCC doesn't actually adjudicate polling methodology, that's not really their — okay, it's not about the polling being wrong. It's about the coverage being unflattering, which is different from wrong, and I should not have conflated those.
Separately, and this is a completely unrelated matter, the party's campaign arms have asked the Supreme Court to intervene in a case over television ad rates. This is a pro-competition position. Campaigns should not be overcharged for airtime the law already says has to be sold at the lowest unit rate. It's a fairness issue. It has nothing to do with wanting cheaper access to more airtime to run more ads featuring the numbers we do like. That's not — I didn't mean to imply there's a numbers-we-do-and-don't-like situation. There isn't. There's just accurate numbers and inaccurate numbers, and my party has never had a preference between the two categories, categorically, ever, which is a sentence I now regret.…
…(cont) The through-line, if you're looking for one, and you shouldn't be, because there isn't one, is that the FCC petition and the Supreme Court petition are both filed with government bodies, in the same season, by the same political operation, asking, in one case, for less unfavorable speech and in the other, for more affordable speech of its own. That is a coincidence of docket, not of design. I have now said 'design' twice in a paragraph about something I insist has no design behind it, and I am going to stop talking.
What I will say, on the record, one final time, is that neither filing constitutes leverage over the press. They are simply two separate requests, filed by the same party, to two separate government bodies, both of which happen to referee how Americans hear about elections. That's not leverage. I don't know what you'd call it. I'm not going to call it anything.
“Punish the polls you don't like, then ask a judge for a discount on the airtime you use to spread the ones you do. Same week, same party, same playbook: control what people hear, and pay less for it.”
“The FCC inquiry is about polling accuracy and the ad-rate case is about fair pricing for candidates — two totally separate legal filings that happen to both ask the government to make our media environment more favorable, which I did not mean to say out loud.”
The receipts
The GOP’s campaign arms asked the Supreme Court on Friday to step in and allow them to buy television ads at the cheapest rate ahead of the midterms after a federal appeals court ruled that only candidates are entitled to the special rate…
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.