National Poll Shows Nothing More Than The People Likely To Be Angered By The FBI’s Raid On Trump’s Home Were Angered By It (original) (raw)

from the BREAKING:-TRUMP-FANS-LIKE-FBI-EVEN-LESS dept

Let’s get this out of the way immediately: the FBI is not a trustworthy agency. It has a long history of civil rights abuses, national security power abuses, and has spent more than four years refusing to be honest about the effect device encryption has on investigations.

But to pretend the recent raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home caused an across-the-board drop in trust in the agency is to willingly ignore the data. That’s what Casey Harper appears to be doing in his article for The Center Square, which is entitled “Poll: Mar-A-Lago raid has eroded trust in the agency.”

Now, it may be that Harper doesn’t write his own headlines. But he did write this:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation raid on former President Donald Trump has eroded Americans’ trust in the agency, according to a new poll.

Rasmussen Reports released the data, which showed that 44% of surveyed Americans say the raid made them trust the federal law enforcement agency less.

This is partially Rasmussen’s fault. Its own post on its poll has this ridiculous headline:

‘Biden’s Gestapo’? Trump Raid Hurts Voter Trust in FBI

And says this in the body of the post:

A new national telephone and online survey by Rasmussen Reports finds that 44% of Likely U.S. voters say the FBI raid on Trump’s Florida home made them trust the FBI less, compared to 29% who say it made them trust the bureau more. Twenty-three percent (23%) say the Trump raid did not make much difference in their trust of the FBI.

But it really did nothing of the sort. The poll data actually show nothing more than the amplification of echoes in chambers built specifically for the purpose of amplifying echoes.

The data say completely unsurprising things, like the fact that people prone to be pissed off about the FBI’s raid of Trump’s home are now angry at the FBI. The largest percentage of poll respondents who have a very unfavorable impression of the FBI following the raid are white, male Republicans above the age of 40 — more than double any other demographic.

And that trend holds, again unsurprisingly, when Rasmussen asked specifically about the Mar-a-Lago raid:

Non-unexpectedly, the same sort of responses were given to Rasmussen’s much more loaded question: “There is a group of ‘politicized thugs at the top of the FBI who are using the FBI… as Joe Biden’s personal Gestapo.”

One would think a national pollster might avoid directly quoting long-time political operative/Trump pardon recipient Roger Stone while conducting a poll, but here we are. Rasmussen does not note how many times poll respondents uttered the phrase “Let’s go, Brandon!” during these interactions.

This poll doesn’t show anything anyone could have assumed following the search of Trump’s house. Democrats trust the FBI just a bit more than they already did. Republicans got even angrier at an agency they really haven’t cared for since then-FBI Director James Comey rebuffed Trump’s demands for total fealty. And Comey was the one who won over Trump fans — at least momentarily — by publicly reopening the FBI’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server just days before the 2016 election.

But those whose love and hate of the FBI are closely tied to their political allegiances are dupes falling victim to short cons. The long con is the agency itself, which may not be the amoral entity it was under J. Edgar Hoover, but still has a long way to go before anyone should consider it inherently trustworthy.

Filed Under: donald trump, fbi, polls, trustworthy
Companies: rasmussen