Fact check: Trump falsely claims his highly unpopular big bill is the ‘single most popular bill ever signed’
Despite widespread public opposition and low awareness, Trump insists his bill is beloved — but polls tell a different story.
On Friday, before signing his sweeping domestic policy bill into law, President Donald Trump declared at the White House that it was the most popular bill in the history of our country.
This reflects reality.
Poll after poll has shown that this bill is deeply unpopular. Even if the polls are flawed, this bill would not be popular—let alone the most popular bill in U.S. history—even with a significant and widespread error.
According to a Fox News poll conducted in mid-June, 59% of registered voters opposed the bill, while 38% supported it, and 3% said they didn’t know. According to a Quinnipiac University poll conducted in late June, 55% of registered voters opposed the bill, while 29% supported it, and 16% expressed no opinion. According to a Pew Research Center poll conducted in early June, 49% of adults opposed the bill, 29% supported it, and 21% were undecided.
After reviewing these numbers and similar results from two other polls on the bill, CNN senior data analyst Harry Entene said on air Monday, “The numbers aren’t that bad. I looked in the history books to see if any other legislation that was about to be passed was just as popular, but I couldn’t find it.”
CNN senior correspondent Aaron Blake reported on June 20 that the poll results made the bill “more unpopular than any other major piece of legislation since at least 1990, according to data compiled by Chris Warshaw, a political science professor at George Washington University.” In an analysis published Friday, ahead of Trump’s speech, data scientist J. Elliott Morris said: “On average, across polls and methods, 31% of Americans support the ‘big bill,’ while 54% oppose it. That net score of -23 is, to say the least, very low.”
Trump likely consulted private polls that yielded different results. Of course, a bill’s popularity can increase after it’s passed, and Americans feel the effects; that’s what happened with Obamacare.
But if Trump had evidence to support his claim that it was the most popular bill in American history, he didn’t introduce it Friday.
The president also made other false statements in his speech from the White House:
The claim that “we didn’t… impose a Social Security tax on seniors.” The bill doesn’t completely eliminate the Social Security tax; instead, it creates a temporary $6,000 additional tax credit for people 65 and older each year from 2025 to 2028 (a smaller credit for those earning more than $75,000 a year). The White House has stated that 88% of seniors would not pay taxes on their Social Security benefits thanks to this additional credit, compared to 64% currently. But even if the White House is correct, millions of seniors in the remaining 12% would still be subject to taxes, as would some Social Security beneficiaries under 65, who do not benefit from this new credit.
A false claim, repeated repeatedly by Trump, that President Joe Biden has allowed “21 million” immigrants to enter the United States. By December 2024, the last full month of Biden’s presidency, the country had recorded fewer than 11 million immigrant “encounters” under that administration, including the millions quickly expelled from the country. Even if you include the so-called fugitives who managed to evade detection, estimated by Republicans at 2.2 million, the total number is impossible to reach 21 million.
