The president’s tweets about the Mueller report continue to perform below the long-term median for Republicans, Democrats, and independents
On Thursday, April 18, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election was released by the Department of Justice. In the days following the release of the redacted document, President Donald Trump declared the 448-page report a “big, fat waste of time, energy, and money” and claimed parts of it were “fabricated and totally untrue” in a three-part Twitter thread.
The thread was not relatively well-received by most Americans, according to data drawn from YouGov’s TweetIndex, a daily tracker of President Trump's tweets. Every day, a nationally representative sample of Americans are asked to rate the president's tweets on a five-point scale from Great (+2) to Terrible (-2), which produces an overall score for how the general population feels about the tweet on a scale from -200 (if everyone thinks it is terrible) to +200 (if everyone thinks it is great).
YouGov has been asking the American public about their views on President Trump’s tweets since February 2017. This data shows that the median score for his tweets in this time among the US population as a whole is -18. Analysis of public sentiment around the president’s tweets following the publication of the Mueller report shows that the three-part thread scored -40, well below this long-term median.
Trump’s tweet stating that parts of the Mueller report were “fabricated and totally untrue” landed just slightly below the median amongst his own political party. Republicans rated this tweet 3 points lower than the Republican median score of +102 for President Trump’s other tweets to date, which lands it in the bottom 45% of tweets. The median score that Republicans have granted all Trump tweets including the word “Mueller” is +89.
Among independents, the tweet garnered a score of -43, which is 30 points lower than the independent median of -13 and falls in the bottom 9% of all Trump tweet scores. Independents are less likely to view Trump’s Mueller-specific tweets in a favorable light—the tweets containing Mueller’s name earn a median score of -36.
Democrats especially disliked the message—the social post landed in the bottom 1% of all Trump tweets for them, 49 points below the median (-108). Among the more than 5,600 Trump's tweets that YouGov has analyzed, only 27 posts have been perceived more negatively among Democrats.
Since the Mueller report was released, President Trump has continued to post on Twitter questioning Robert Mueller and his team, as well as criticizing the origin of the investigation. Those tweets continue to perform slightly below the median for Republicans, more firmly below the median for independents, and sharply below the median among Democrats.
Methodology: YouGov TweetIndex shows how the public rate each tweet from Trump’s Twitter account. At the end of every day, YouGov shows a representative sample of US adults the tweets sent in the past 24 hours by President Trump. The panelists are asked to rate the posts on a scale Great (+2), Good (+1), OK (0), Bad (-1), and Terrible (-2). Theoretically, scores can range from -200 (if everyone thought the tweet was “Terrible”) to +200 (if everyone thought the tweet was “Great”).
Tweet Index
You can review the history of our ratings of President Trump's tweets back to February 2017 on our YouGov TweetIndex.
