Trump: 'I'm not a huge believer in polling'

President Donald Trump on Wednesday revived his attacks on the polling industry, denying reports that his own internal polling has indicated trouble ahead for his reelection bid, even as public polls show warning signs.

The president pushed back on a New York Times story detailing his response to a “devastating” 17-state poll conducted by his internal pollster, and he reiterated that he believes the internal poll circulating was false but offered no evidence to back up his claim.

Trump said that the leak of "phony polls" that showed him lagging behind was "ridiculous," declaring in the Oval Office that to the contrary, "we are winning in every single state that we've polled."

According to the Times, after being briefed on the poll, Trump asked aides to deny that he was trailing former Vice President Joe Biden in several key states. When the toplines of Trump’s internal polls leaked, he reportedly then asked advisers to “say publicly that other data showed him doing well.”

"These are polls that we have that nobody saw," Trump said, apparently referring to the internal polls that he said show him in good shape for next year. "We do very little polling because I'm not a huge believer in polling. I think you go out and you fight and you don't really need polls, you need ideas, more than polls. But we have some internal polling, very little, and it's unbelievably strong. The strongest I've ever been is exactly today."

In a pair of tweets earlier Wednesday, Trump cheered the power social media gives him to “fight back” against media outlets, writing that “Their new weapon of choice is Fake Polling, sometimes referred to as Suppression Polls (they suppress the numbers).”

“The Fake (Corrupt) News Media said they had a leak into polling done by my campaign,” he said, claiming that despite the flurry of investigations dogging him, his internal polls “are the best numbers WE have ever had.”

“They reported Fake numbers that they made up & don’t even exist. WE WILL WIN AGAIN!” he added.

Referring to his 2016 attacks on pollsters, Trump also said that a current spate of polls that have shown him losing in head-to-head matchups with any number of the top 2020 Democratic contenders “is worse” than 2016.

The latest damaging numbers came Tuesday, in a national Quinnipiac poll that showed Trump losing to six 2020 Democrats by as little as 5 points to as much as 13. In the past several weeks, polls have shown the president trailing in two other states key to his 2016 election: Michigan and Pennsylvania. One Quinnipiac poll last week even showed Biden topping Trump in the GOP stronghold of Texas.

But while the president insisted there’s no cause for alarm, his campaign has begun scrambling to shore up his standing in the Rust Belt and even eyed blue states in an effort to expand Trump’s path to victory in 2020, indicating at least some level of concern from his advisers.