Donald Trump Suddenly Has a Favorite CNN Star

Photo Illustration by Victoria Sunday/The Daily Beast/Getty Images Donald Trump has spent the better part of a decade telling Americans not to watch CNN .

On Saturday, he accidentally revealed that he does.

The president made the admission in the middle of a Truth Social tirade declaring that CNN is in a “DEATH SPIRAL” and insisting that “Literally, nobody is watching” the network.

He then made it clear that, literally, he is watching—and closely enough to have a favorite personality: data guru Harry Enten .

“The best person on CNN is Pollster Harry Enten,” Trump declared, adding an emphatic command to the network: “Don’t fire him!” That’s quite an endorsement from a president who has spent years branding CNN “FAKE NEWS,” calling it FNN (for Fake News Network), dubbing Jake Tapper “Fake Tapper,” and repeatedly sparring with Kaitlan Collins for asking questions he doesn’t want to answer—and also, seemingly, for not smiling enough .

Enten, meanwhile, spends much of his airtime explaining why Trump’s numbers are so bad.

As recently as Friday, Enten showed that Trump’s attempt to rename Lake Ontario “Lake America” was going nowhere , with Google searches for “Lake Ontario” vastly outpacing those for Trump’s preferred name.

The previous week, he reported that Americans are “ p---ed off ” about Trump’s various Washington renovation projects.

And earlier this month, Enten highlighted Trump’s “wildly” unpopular standing with Americans on gas prices .

So what prompted the sudden affection? On Wednesday, a seemingly flabbergasted Enten presented a poll showing that Trump remains overwhelmingly popular within the Republican Party: 53 percent of GOP respondents said Trump is the president they admire most, compared with 18 percent for Ronald Reagan and eight percent for Abraham Lincoln.

Trump seized on the result, claiming Enten “was willing to show that Donald J.

Trump is six times more popular than Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, or any other President.” Except that’s not quite what the poll determined.

The comparison was based on Republican respondents, and Trump was three times as popular as Reagan, the second-place choice—not six times as popular as every president who ever lived.

“Abraham Lincoln, who by most historic accounts is the greatest president of all-time, but Republicans say that the president they most admire by—what is this, six or seven times as many—[is] Donald John Trump at 53 percent.