Washington, US President Donald Trump has slammed a new Fox News poll which showed that over half of the surveyed American voters supported the ongoing impeachment inquiry against him and his removal from office.
Released on Wednesday, the poll showed that 51 per cent of the 1,003 randomly chosen registered voters wanted Trump to be impeached and removed from office, Xinhua news agency reported.
The result compared to 42 per cent in July, before House Democrats launched the impeachment inquiry into Trump in September over the President’s alleged inappropriate interactions with Ukraine.
“From the day I announced I was running for President, I have never had a good @FoxNews Poll,” the President tweeted on Thursday. “Whoever their pollster is, they suck.”
Compared to other media outlets, Fox has been viewed by Trump as being friendly to him and the President has often retweeted the news network’s positive reports about him.
This time, however, he tweeted: “But @FoxNews is also much different than it used to be in the good old days.”
The poll, conducted between October 6-8 with a margin of sampling error of plus and minus 3 percentage points, also showed 51 per cent of the surveyed considered the Trump administration more corrupt than previous ones, up from September’s 46 per cent.
A rough transcript of the phone call between Trump and his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky on July 25 showed the former asked the latter to investigate Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
The poll showed that an overwhelming majority, or 66 per cent, of the respondents believed that it was not appropriate for Trump to ask foreign leaders to investigate his political rivals, and that 43 per cent of them agreed that what the American President said on the phone was an impeachable offence.
Trump tweeted last week that his request for an investigation into the Bidens was not a political campaign against them. “This does have to do with their corruption.”
In an earlier tweet, Trump claimed that he as President has an “obligation” to end corruption, “even if that means requesting the help of a foreign country or countries”.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic congresswoman who announced the initiation of the impeachment process on September 24, has accused the Trump administration of “brazen efforts to pressure foreign powers to intervene in the 2020 elections”.
The Fox News poll showed that 42 per cent of the respondents were in favour of Pelosi’s opinion in the impeachment inquiry, compared to 43 per cent who sided with Trump.
Separately, a Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released on Tuesday showed 55 per cent of the respondents thought that Congress should launch an impeachment investigation into Trump, 24 per cent believed there was enough evidence justifying the President’s impeachment and removal, and 31 per cent said the decision should be contingent upon further proof to be found in the impeachment inquiry.
