President Donald Trump declared CNN doomed on Saturday, August 29, 2026 — and then, in the same Truth Social post, ordered the network not to fire one of its stars.
The president labeled CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten “the best person on CNN,” praising him for putting numbers on air that Trump read as evidence of a sixfold popularity edge over Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and every other occupant of the office. In a parenthetical aside, he instructed the network’s management not to fire the analyst, adding that Enten has credibility.
The praise arrived bundled with a jab. In the same message, Trump pronounced CNN to be in a “DEATH SPIRAL,” applied the same label to MS NOW — MSNBC’s new name, which he rendered as MSDNC — and claimed neither network draws an audience. Fresh leadership and new anchors could rescue CNN, he wrote, because a genuinely great brand can never truly be destroyed — but MS NOW, he added, is beyond saving.
The Segment That Started It
The compliment stems from a “reality check” segment Enten presented on Wednesday, August 26, with CNN anchor John Berman. Enten took viewers through an SSRS poll for CNN asking Americans which president they admire most. Trump was the pick of 53 percent of Republicans. Ronald Reagan pulled 18 percent, while Lincoln — whom Enten called the greatest president by most historians’ reckoning — landed at 8 percent.
Enten read the numbers as proof of Trump’s continued hold on the GOP, describing him to Berman as the sun that the party’s planets still circle. “I feel like this slide might end up on a printout on his desk sometime soon if he hasn’t seen it already,” Berman quipped.
Trump’s rendering of the poll, however, stretched past what it actually gauged. Republicans were the ones being asked, and the names on offer were Republican presidents. His 53 percent did run roughly six times Lincoln’s 8 percent, but it was only about triple the 18 percent Reagan collected in second place. Washington, whom Trump named directly, did not appear in that question at all.
Results across all respondents tell another story. CNN and SSRS reached 2,480 U.S. adults by telephone and online between May 7 and 31, 2026; the overall figures carry an error margin of 2.7 percentage points in either direction, widening to 5.2 points for the Republican subgroup. Among everyone surveyed, Barack Obama finished first at 30 percent, with Trump next at 19 percent. Lincoln and Reagan each drew 9 percent, and John F. Kennedy 6 percent.
A Second Poll, a Narrower Margin
Enten set those figures beside Elon University’s America250 survey, which registered a milder version of the same partisan loyalty: 29 percent of Republicans named Trump the best president in U.S. history, with Lincoln at 25 percent and Washington at 14 percent. Among all respondents, Lincoln finished on top at 26 percent; Obama took 17 percent, Washington 12 percent and Trump 11 percent, while Reagan and Franklin D. Roosevelt shared 9 percent apiece. Democratic support for Trump was all but nonexistent, and independents gave him 6 percent; on an open-ended question about which public figure best embodies the highest ideals of American democracy, he came fifth at 7 percent. YouGov ran the online poll from April 30 to May 4, interviewing 1,077 adults and matching them to a final sample of 1,000, with an error margin of 3.95 points either way.
Such party-line devotion sits awkwardly next to the president’s broader standing. The Angus Reid Institute measured his approval at 34 percent, with 58 percent disapproving. Reuters/Ipsos polled 1,215 U.S. adults between August 21 and 24 and put his approval at a record-low 33 percent; 65 percent called the economy weak, and while 31 percent supported U.S. military action against Iran, 63 percent objected. Rasmussen Reports, long among his more favorable pollsters, recorded his worst-ever mark in its approval tracker in June 2026.
Enten’s Less Flattering Numbers
Enten’s broadcasts have seldom flattered the president. On Friday, August 28, he noted that Trump’s campaign to rebrand Lake Ontario as “Lake America” had gone nowhere, with Google searches for the original name dwarfing those for the new one. Earlier in the month, he treated strong Democratic primary turnout as an alarm bell ahead of November’s midterms. Asked how he would see things from inside Trump’s White House, Enten said he would be running scared, since the numbers don’t lie.
Enten has also drawn attention to Trump’s endorsement of South Carolina’s Darline Graham, who won a primary for the seat once held by her brother, longtime Sen. Lindsey Graham, following his unexpected death in July.
Saturday’s post followed two days after an exercise in presidential self-evaluation. On Thursday, August 27, Trump shared a ranking of American presidents that placed him alone in a tier labeled “The Greatest,” relegating Lincoln, Washington, Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson to a lesser category marked “Great.” Reagan was missing entirely. The next day, Trump posted a revised graphic installing Reagan alongside himself, Washington, Lincoln and Jefferson as the “five who built America.”
Trump has branded CNN “FAKE NEWS” and “FNN,” nicknamed CNN’s Jake Tapper “Fake Tapper” and repeatedly clashed with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. His interest in who keeps a job there may not be purely academic: Paramount Skydance CEO David Ellison is pursuing a $110 billion takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery that would place CNN under his company, a deal still facing legal hurdles.