Trump Claims Popularity Six Times That of Lincoln and Washington
U.S. President Donald Trump claimed that his popularity is six times that of Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, or any other U.S. president. This assertion was subsequently disseminated as a newsflash by prediction market platforms.
The figures come from a CNN-commissioned SSRS survey conducted from May 7 to 31, with a sampling error of plus or minus 5.2 percentage points. 53% of Republican respondents named Trump as the most admired Republican president, while Ronald Reagan received 18% and Lincoln 8%. The ratio of 53% to 8% indicates that Trump is over six times more favored than Lincoln among party members. Analyst Harry Enten presented this comparison on the program.
Another survey from Elon University during the same period showed that 29% of Republicans named Trump as the best president in U.S. history, followed by Lincoln at 25% and Washington at 14%. When the sample was expanded to all voters, Lincoln led with 26%, Barack Obama at 17%, Washington at 12%, and Trump at 11%. In CNN/SSRS's national poll, Obama topped with 30%, Trump was second at 19%, and Lincoln and Reagan each received 9%.
Trump shared related television clips on Truth Social and released a self-made presidential ranking chart, placing himself in the "greatest" category, while Lincoln, Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson were categorized as "great." The chart's framework closely resembles the 1948 historical survey classification by Life magazine, with contemporary presidents added, and Joe Biden, Obama, and Jimmy Carter categorized as "failures."
In the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project historical survey, Lincoln remains first, followed by Roosevelt and Washington, with Trump ranked last. A Reuters/Ipsos national approval rating from August 21 to 24 showed 33% support and 65% opposition. Trump has repeatedly made similar comparisons, stating before the 2020 election that even if Washington and Lincoln teamed up, he could win by 25 or 40 percentage points.
In market terms, the buyers are Republican voters needing party identity confirmation and attention platforms, while the sellers are rewriting the narrative of "most admired living Republican president" to "more popular than founding and Civil War presidents." The event is driven by television polling slices, with funds and traffic directed towards social posts that strengthen personal branding and prediction markets, rather than historical ranking institutions. The beneficiaries are the personalized loyalty structures within the party, while the priority of the Reagan-Lincoln symbols in Republican memory is under pressure, and the national approval rating remains in the low thirties.
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Trump positions Lincoln and Washington as comparable opponents, a tactic not new since 2016. During his 2016 campaign, he claimed he could achieve what Lincoln did not in terms of unity; in 2020, he stated his contributions to Black Americans were second only to Lincoln's; in 2022, he echoed a Hispanic leader's claim of winning by 40 points over the Washington-Lincoln combination. The pattern is consistent: first, he diminishes national mythic figures to comparable candidates, then replaces century-old historical rankings with immediate party polling. The acquisition is not of artifacts but of interpretative power.
Resource mobilization occurs through media slices rather than new legislation. CNN analysts created a bar graph showing "most admired Republican president" with 53% versus 8%, visually representing a six to seven times difference; Trump shared this image along with his ranking chart through his social channels, completing a secondary definition. The motivation is to counterbalance absolute approval ratings, which have dipped into the low thirties, with relative values within the party. Strategically, whoever controls the "greatest" label controls the psychological anchor points for the next Republican nomination and fundraising lists.
Similar operations can be seen in past campaigns that invoked founding fathers in contemporary elections, as well as leaders in Turkey and Hungary rewriting the genealogy of national founders using current voting rates. Historical surveys still place Lincoln, Washington, and Roosevelt at the top, while party identification surveys rank incumbents highest. The Republican Party is currently in a phase where personal branding overshadows traditional icons, rather than expanding into new policy coalitions.
The essence is a transfer of pricing power: the pricing power of historical status shifts from scholarly surveys to party-specific instant sampling. The mechanism is sample contraction—the question shifts from "Who is the greatest in U.S. history?" to "Which Republican president do Republicans currently admire most?" Changing the denominator reveals the multiples. National opposition rates and historical last-place rankings do not factor into this arithmetic; they remain in another market for trading.