Donald Trump touts poll showing him at 50%, not the one putting him at 41%

Donald Trump touted a poll Monday that put him at a 50 per cent approval rating.

But the U.S. president had nothing to say about another one that showed him at 41 per cent.

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Trump tweeted Monday about a poll from Rasmussen Reports that showed 50 per cent of likely U.S. voters approved of his job performance.

It showed an equal percentage disapproving.

“This is the first time the president’s overall approval rating has been back in the 50s in nearly a month,” Rasmussen Reports said.

“Just after his inauguration, Trump’s job approval peaked at 59 per cent and remained in the 50s every day until early March. It’s gone as low as 42 per cent since then.”

Rasmussen collects its poll results through telephone surveys of 500 likely voters per night; they’re reported on a three-day rolling average basis.

It also polls randomly-selected participants from a “demographically diverse panel” using an online survey tool. It has a 2.5-per-cent margin of error.

READ MORE: Donald Trump’s approval rating hits its lowest mark since the inauguration

In the past, Rasmussen Reports founder Scott Rasmussen has been called a “polarizing pollster,” with Democrats saying in 2012 that he was biased in favour of the Republicans, The Washington Post reported.

The campaign of then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney, however, touted his numbers strongly.

Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight gives Rasmussen Reports a grade of C+, with a record of calling races correctly 79 per cent of the time.

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But Rasmussen’s results also represented a strong divergence with polls reported by Gallup, which has a B-minus rating from FiveThirtyEight.

Gallup’s most recent results on April 15 show Trump holding an approval rating of 41 per cent and a disapproval rating of 53 per cent.

That represents an increase from the end of March, when Trump’s approval rating hit 35 per cent, the lowest it had been since his inauguration in January.

READ MORE: Donald Trump says ‘any negative polls are fake news’

In the past, Trump has shown that he’s very selective about the poll results he chooses to accept.

In February, he tweeted that “any negative polls are fake news,” pointing specifically at NBC, ABC and CNN polls that took place during the election.

It wasn’t clear which polls he was referring to.

A CNN/ORC International poll, released one day earlier, showed 52 per cent of Americans being unhappy with his actions in office.

Those results marked Trump’s highest disapproval rating at the time since polls began tracking them.