Donald Trump predicted Thursday his new nickname will be “Mr. Brexit.”
“They will soon be calling me MR. BREXIT,” tweeted the Republican presidential nominee, who in June compared his campaign to the British movement to leave the European Union.
Trailing his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton in every major, recent national poll, Trump might be dreaming of his own Brexit-style upset. But for that to happen, Trump will need to significantly narrow the gap.
Many polls in the final days leading up to the British referendum on leaving the European Union wrongly predicted British voters would vote to remain in Europe. And pundits’ forecasts were also largely inaccurate.
But while Brexit polling in the final days put the two camps in the referendum within a few percentage points of one another, Trump’s deficit to Clinton is outside the margin of error, according to a series of recent national polls.
The Republican nominee is trailing his Democratic rival in every single national poll since the Democrats held their national convention in late July — a 6-point deficit according to Bloomberg, an 8-point gap according to ABC News/Washington Post and a Pew Research Center poll released Thursday found Clinton up 4 points.
And Trump is also trailing Clinton in a spate of recent battleground polls as well as in several states that typically tilt toward the GOP nominee in presidential elections.
The combination of those polls with Trump’s apparent inability to escape controversy for more than a few days are leaving some political analysts warning of a landslide victory for Clinton in November.
The slew of polling has left Trump — the real estate mogul who frequently boasted of his polling lead during the Republican primaries — largely silent when it comes to discussing polls. He now rarely mentions polls on the stump or in his tweets, save for a recent tweet showing Trump just two points behind in an online poll.
One of Trump’s close advisers, Michael Cohen, appeared in denial of Trump’s deficit when asked about it Wednesday on CNN.
“Says who?” Cohen replied when CNN’s Brianna Keilar noted that Trump is trailing Clinton in the race for the White House.
“Polls. Most of them. All of them,” Keilar replied.
“My statement to you is I don’t care about those poll numbers,” Cohen said. “You’re going to all be very surprised when he polls substantially higher than what you all are giving him credit for.”
Trump’s new campaign manager, Kellyanne Conway, acknowledged on CNN’s “New Day” Thursday her candidate is trailing in the polls but vowed the campaign would make up lost ground.
“I think it helps us to be a little bit behind, and we are. It lights a fire under us and reminds us what we need to do to get done,” Conway said.
Trump first suggested he “will be called Mr. Brexit” in an interview Tuesday night that Fox News published Thursday as he proclaimed that his campaign is a movement and one of the “single greatest phenomena.”
As the Fox interviewer noted that “the country’s changing, the world is changing,” and mentioned Brexit, Trump replied:
“Well, I think I will be called Mr. Brexit.”
Trump campaign spokeswoman Hope Hicks declined to contextualize Thursday’s tweet, saying simply that, “Mr. Trump’s tweets speak for themselves.”
Trump predicted the United Kingdom would vote to leave the EU before British voters headed to the polls.
And in a news conference he held in Scotland the day after British voters made their choice, Trump suggested his campaign would give American voters a chance to also “re-declare their independence.”
“Come November, the American people will have the chance to re-declare their independence. Americans will have a chance to vote for trade, immigration and foreign policies that put our citizens first,” he said. “They will have the chance to reject today’s rule by the global elite, and to embrace real change that delivers a government of, by and for the people.”
