Trump Blasts The New York Times Over Fake 'Wedgewood Polls' Scandal in Late-Night Truth Social Post

President Donald Trump lit up The New York Times in a late-night Truth Social post on Thursday, accusing the newspaper of getting "caught" using fabricated polling data from Wedgewood Polls — a polling firm that admitted this week that most of its published data was made up. The post, published at 11:22 PM EDT on October 22, landed less than two weeks before the November 3 midterms and in the middle of one of the strangest scandals to hit the American polling industry in years: an entire fake polling operation that fooled major aggregators and news outlets, pumped bogus numbers into high-profile races, and — according to at least one candidate — killed a Senate campaign's fundraising outright.

Trump's post is the latest and loudest entry in a fast-moving story that has already drawn warnings from the FCC chair, the American Association for Public Opinion Research, and polling aggregators who now admit they were carrying fraudulent data. The New York Times, for its part, has quietly removed 15 Wedgewood surveys from its poll tracker database after an editors' note acknowledged the firm's inclusion in its data.

What Trump Actually Posted Thursday Night

Trump's Truth Social post (post ID 117488073122158937, archived at trumpstruth.org) read, in part, verbatim:

> "The New York Times got caught! They used a Company, Wedgewood Polls, that ADMITTED that the Poll Numbers they published were made up and FAKE. This is what I've had to deal with, right from the beginning! Our powerful Lawsuit against them is getting stronger and stronger everyday."

The post continued by declaring that everything about "The Failing New York Times" is "ARTIFICIAL," closing with Trump's familiar sign-off: "Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP"

A few things to note about the post, in the interest of accuracy. "Got caught," "Failing New York Times," and the claim that everything about the paper is "ARTIFICIAL" are Trump's characterizations — his opinions, not established facts. The reference to "our powerful Lawsuit" points to Trump's own ongoing lawsuit against The New York Times, which he has mentioned publicly before; the merits and status of that litigation are his claims here, and this article does not independently assess them. And the core factual assertion — that Wedgewood Polls admitted its numbers were fabricated — is, according to multiple outlets' reporting, accurate: the firm itself acknowledged the fabrication.

The Wedgewood Polls Scandal: A Polling Firm That Was Never Real

To understand why Trump's post matters — and why the story has shaken the polling world — you have to start with what Wedgewood Polls actually was: not a sloppy pollster, not a biased one, but, by its own admission, an experiment in manufacturing credibility out of thin air.

According to reporting by TBS News in October 2026, the saga began when the polling aggregator FiftyPlusOne contacted Wedgewood Polls on October 20 as part of an investigation into the firm's data. The response was extraordinary: Wedgewood admitted that "most" of its published data was made up. On X, the firm said it had been "experimenting on how easy it could be for an entirely fabricated polling firm to gain traction and be taken seriously." Its X account has since been taken down.

Read that again slowly, because the implications are enormous. A completely fabricated polling operation — no real respondents, no real methodology, no real fieldwork — managed to get its numbers carried by major polling aggregators and cited by major news outlets, including The New York Times. The bogus data covered high-profile races in several states, meaning fake numbers were circulating as if they were legitimate measures of voter sentiment during a midterm cycle.

This is not a story about a poll being wrong. Polls are wrong all the time — sampling error, late-breaking shifts, turnout-model misses are the ordinary hazards of survey research. This is a story about polls that had no relationship to any actual surveying at all, dressed up in the formatting and language of professional polling and accepted into the ecosystem anyway. The distinction matters, and it is why the professional polling world is treating this as a crisis rather than a curiosity.

How the Fake Numbers Spread: The NYT's 15 Removed Surveys

The New York Times's exposure is the detail Trump seized on, and it is documented in the paper's own editors' note. According to the reporting, the Times's poll tracker database included 15 Wedgewood surveys released between June and October — all of which have now been removed.

Fifteen surveys over roughly four months is not a trivial footprint. A poll tracker is one of the most visible data products a news organization maintains; it is where campaigns, journalists, and political obsessives go to see the state of the race. For a fabricated firm's numbers to sit in that database from June through October means that for months, anyone reading the Times's tracker was looking at — at least in part — numbers that corresponded to no actual voters.

The Times is not alone in this. The TBS News reporting notes that the bogus data was "highlighted by major aggregators and outlets including the NYT" — plural outlets, plural aggregators. The full accounting of which newsrooms carried Wedgewood numbers, and for how long, is still emerging. But the pattern is clear: once a fabricated firm cracked the aggregator layer, its numbers cascaded downstream into news coverage, candidate strategy, and donor behavior.

How does a fake firm get taken seriously in the first place? Part of the answer is structural. The polling aggregator economy rewards volume and freshness: dozens of firms release numbers constantly, aggregators compete to include the widest universe of polls, and readers treat the resulting averages as something close to scientific consensus. A firm with a plausible name, a professional-looking methodology statement, and numbers that don't look insane can slip in — especially if its figures confirm what the people using them already suspect. Wedgewood's own stated thesis was exactly this: it was testing how easily a fabricated operation could "gain traction and be taken seriously." The experiment, by all available evidence, worked.

Real Damage: A Senate Campaign Says a Fake Poll Killed Its Fundraising

The Wedgewood story would be disturbing enough as an industry scandal. What makes it genuinely consequential is that there is already a named victim who says a fabricated poll changed the course of a real campaign.

Michigan Senate candidate Mallory McMorrow said that a late-June Wedgewood poll showing her support in single digits devastated her fundraising. In her telling, "donations dried up" — and she put it more bluntly than that: "It killed us."

Consider what that means in practice. A Senate campaign lives and dies on fundraising momentum. Donors — especially the small-dollar online donors who have become the lifeblood of modern campaigns — take their cues from perceived viability. A poll showing a candidate in single digits sends a clear signal: this race is over, save your money. If that poll was fabricated, then real money, real staff hires, real ad buys, and potentially a real Senate seat were affected by numbers that were invented out of nothing.

McMorrow's account also illustrates the asymmetry of the damage. A fake poll that inflates a candidate's numbers might get corrected by later, real polling. A fake poll that craters a candidate's numbers can set off a self-fulfilling spiral: bad poll, drying donations, fewer ads, worse real polls, more donor flight. By the time the fraud is exposed — as it was here, months later, only because an aggregator happened to start asking questions — the damage is done and unrecoverable. The October 20 contact from FiftyPlusOne came four months after the late-June poll McMorrow cites. Four months is a lifetime in a campaign.

It is also worth being precise about what is known and what is not. McMorrow attributes her fundraising collapse to the Wedgewood poll; that is her stated account. Campaigns have many reasons to struggle with fundraising, and it is impossible from the outside to isolate one poll's exact causal weight. But her claim is specific, it is on the record, and it names the mechanism — a fabricated number, amplified through the aggregator-to-outlet pipeline, read by donors as a verdict on viability. Whether or not it was the sole cause, it is a plausible and vivid illustration of why fabricated polling is not a victimless prank.

The Vetting Dispute: Aggregators Say They Did Check

One of the most contested questions in the fallout is also one of the most important: did anyone actually vet Wedgewood before using its polls? Here, the reporting captures a genuine dispute, and both sides deserve to be heard.

Wedgewood's version — implied by its framing of the whole episode as an experiment in how easily a fabricated firm could be taken seriously — is that the aggregators did not meaningfully check. The firm's X statement suggested the industry's gates were open.

But according to reporting from nanobyte.site and VoteHub, the aggregators FiftyPlusOne and VoteHub say they did vet Wedgewood before including its polls. Their account of the vetting process is detailed: they were given the names Jack Sims and Andrew Prater; they confirmed that Sims had prior polling-industry experience; they reviewed Wedgewood's methodology statement; and on October 15, 2026, they received raw survey data from the firm — data that was later confirmed to be fraudulent. VoteHub's head of data science, Zachary Donnini, added a striking detail: the firm was given a D grade in VoteHub's quality rating, but its data was included anyway.

That last detail deserves emphasis, because it cuts through the dispute in an uncomfortable way. Even on the aggregators' own account — vetting done, names checked, methodology reviewed, a D grade assigned — the fraudulent data still went into the averages. A D grade is a warning label, not an exclusion. The question the industry now has to answer is whether a quality-rating system that includes known-D-grade firms is really a vetting system at all, or just a sorting mechanism that failed at the one moment it mattered.

The raw-data episode is equally instructive. Receiving "raw survey data" on October 15 sounds like due diligence — until you learn the data was itself fabricated. A fraudster sophisticated enough to invent poll numbers is sophisticated enough to invent a spreadsheet of fake respondent-level data. The lesson for the industry is a hard one: documentation is not verification. A methodology statement, a plausible biography, and a CSV of numbers are all things a fabricated firm can produce, because they are all things a real firm produces. Verification has to go deeper than checking that the paperwork looks right.

Where does the truth lie in the vetting dispute? Honestly, both things can be true at once: the aggregators may have performed real, good-faith checks and still been fooled, because the checks were aimed at the wrong things. Verifying that a named person once worked in polling is not the same as verifying that a survey was actually fielded. Reviewing a methodology statement is not the same as auditing fieldwork. The Wedgewood episode suggests the industry's vetting standards were built for a world of sloppy or biased pollsters, not for deliberate fabrication — and a deliberate fabricator who knows what the checklist looks like can pass it.

The Industry Responds: FCC Chair, AAPOR, and Voter Trust

The scandal has now drawn responses from the institutions that sit at the edges of the polling ecosystem — regulators, professional associations, and the trust researchers who measure what voters believe about elections themselves.

FCC Chair Brendan Carr acknowledged a rise in entirely false polls meant to disrupt the electoral process and urged media outlets not to amplify hoaxes. That is a notable escalation: the chair of the Federal Communications Commission publicly framing fabricated polling as a form of election disruption, and putting newsrooms on notice that carrying unverified numbers is itself the problem. Carr's warning lands with particular force because the Wedgewood case shows the amplification chain is the vulnerability — the fake firm needed the aggregators and outlets to reach voters and donors.

The American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR), the professional body for survey researchers, warned about bad actors producing and distributing fabricated data, and stressed that legitimate election polls must not be confused with fraud. That distinction is the industry's survival issue right now. Polling as a profession already faces a credibility crisis — response rates have collapsed, misses in recent cycles have been highly publicized, and public trust is thin. A high-profile fabrication scandal risks tarring the entire enterprise: if some polls are literally made up, voters may reasonably ask how they are supposed to tell the real ones from the fake ones. AAPOR's warning is, in effect, a plea to keep that distinction sharp.

And on the question of what voters actually believe, there is a fresh data point — a real one. Reporting from pollar.news cites a NYT/Siena poll finding that roughly 73% of voters trust election accuracy, while 23% do not — up from 17% who distrusted it for 2024. The irony is hard to miss: a story about a fake polling firm is being contextualized by a real poll about election trust, from the same newspaper Trump is attacking. But the trend line is the point. Distrust in election accuracy is rising, and episodes like Wedgewood — real, documented, admitted fraud — give that distrust something concrete to attach to. Every fabricated poll is also, indirectly, an attack on the credibility of every legitimate one.

"Our Powerful Lawsuit": Trump's Legal Fight Against the Times

Trump's post does not just attack the Times's polling coverage — it connects the scandal to his own legal war with the paper. "Our powerful Lawsuit against them," he wrote, "is getting stronger and stronger everyday."

This is Trump's claim, and it should be read as such. The president has an ongoing lawsuit against The New York Times, and he has repeatedly framed his grievances with the paper — over coverage he considers unfair or false — through the lens of that litigation. In this post, he is presenting the Wedgewood episode as vindication: evidence, in his telling, that the paper publishes things that are not real, which in turn strengthens his legal case.

A few boundaries are in order. This article does not assess the merits of Trump's lawsuit, its procedural status, or whether the Wedgewood episode has any actual bearing on it — those are legal questions, and the post itself is the only source cited here for the claim that the suit is "getting stronger." What can be said factually is that the president is using a real, admitted polling fraud — one the Times has acknowledged by removing the surveys — as ammunition in a pre-existing fight. The scandal is real; the lawsuit is real; the connection between them is Trump's argument, not an established fact.

The broader pattern is familiar to anyone who has followed Trump's media strategy for a decade. He has long argued that mainstream outlets publish false or misleading material — the "fake news" frame that defined his first term's press relations. The Wedgewood admission hands him a concrete, documented example of a major outlet carrying fabricated information, and he is deploying it exactly as that frame would predict: not as an isolated industry failure, but as confirmation of a systemic charge. "This is what I've had to deal with, right from the beginning!" — the post's middle section — makes that framing explicit. Whether one finds that framing persuasive or not, it is worth recognizing as a political strategy: a real scandal, converted into evidence for a larger narrative, delivered at 11:22 PM to an audience primed to agree.

It is also worth noting, for balance, what the Times did once the fraud surfaced: it published an editors' note and removed the 15 surveys. That is the standard institutional response to discovering bad data in your database — acknowledge, correct, remove. Trump's post does not credit that response; it treats the initial inclusion as the offense. Readers can decide for themselves how much weight to give the correction versus the original error.

The Timing: Less Than Two Weeks Before the Midterms

Trump's post went up at 11:22 PM EDT on Thursday, October 22. The midterm elections are November 3 — less than two weeks away. That timing is not incidental to the story's significance.

Polling in the final two weeks of a campaign is not background noise; it is the information environment in which the most consequential decisions get made. Donors decide where to put last-minute money. Campaigns decide which races are worth a final ad blitz and which are lost causes. Volunteers decide where to knock doors. Media outlets decide which races to cover as competitive and which to write off. Journalists' "toss-up" ratings shape all of the above. When the numbers feeding those decisions are fabricated, the distortion hits at the moment of maximum leverage.

The Wedgewood surveys ran from June through October, so the contamination is not confined to the home stretch — McMorrow's late-June experience proves that. But the exposure of the fraud, and Trump's amplification of it, arriving in the campaign's final fortnight, guarantees the scandal will be part of the election's closing narrative. Expect the next two weeks to bring more accounting: which outlets carried the numbers, which races were most affected, and whether any campaign besides McMorrow's will go on the record about damage.

There is also a defensive lesson campaigns will be drawing right now, in real time: in the final days, treat every surprising poll with skepticism, check the pollster's track record, and remember that the aggregator average is only as honest as its least honest input. That is a corrosive lesson for the industry — skepticism of all polls is the rational response to the discovery that some polls are fiction — but it is the lesson the Wedgewood episode teaches.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Wedgewood Polls scandal?

Wedgewood Polls was a polling firm that admitted in October 2026 that "most" of its published data was fabricated. After the aggregator FiftyPlusOne contacted the firm on October 20 as part of an investigation, Wedgewood said on X that it had been "experimenting on how easy it could be for an entirely fabricated polling firm to gain traction and be taken seriously." Its bogus data covered high-profile races in several states and was carried by major aggregators and outlets, including The New York Times. Its X account has since been taken down.

What did Trump say about it?

In a Truth Social post at 11:22 PM EDT on Thursday, October 22, Trump wrote that "The New York Times got caught!" using Wedgewood Polls, which he said "ADMITTED that the Poll Numbers they published were made up and FAKE." He added that his "powerful Lawsuit" against the Times "is getting stronger and stronger everyday" and called the paper "The Failing New York Times," saying everything about it is "ARTIFICIAL." The characterizations of the paper are Trump's opinions; the Wedgewood admission is documented fact.

How many Wedgewood polls did The New York Times publish?

According to the Times's own editors' note, its poll tracker database included 15 Wedgewood surveys released between June and October. All 15 have now been removed.

Did the fake polls hurt any real campaigns?

Michigan Senate candidate Mallory McMorrow says yes: she stated that a late-June Wedgewood poll showing her in single digits caused her fundraising to collapse — "donations dried up," she said, adding "It killed us." That is her stated account of the poll's impact on her campaign.

Didn't anyone vet Wedgewood before using its polls?

This is disputed. Wedgewood's framing implies the industry's gates were open. But FiftyPlusOne and VoteHub say they did vet the firm: they were given names (Jack Sims and Andrew Prater), confirmed Sims's prior polling-industry experience, reviewed the methodology statement, and received raw survey data on October 15, 2026 — later confirmed fraudulent. VoteHub's head of data science, Zachary Donnini, said the firm received a D grade but its data was included anyway. Both sides' accounts are reported here as stated.

What have regulators and the polling industry said?

FCC Chair Brendan Carr acknowledged a rise in entirely false polls meant to disrupt the electoral process and urged media not to amplify hoaxes. The American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) warned about bad actors producing and distributing fabricated data and stressed that legitimate election polls must not be confused with fraud.

When did Trump post about this, and when are the midterms?

Trump's Truth Social post went up Thursday, October 22, 2026, at 11:22 PM EDT. The midterm elections are November 3 — less than two weeks later.

Related Articles

• Trump Demands Ilhan Omar Resign Over "Fake Name" Claim

• Trump Accuses Iran of Driving Up Oil Prices Before Midterms

Sources: Truth Social post ID 117488073122158937 (posted 2026-10-23T03:22:05Z; archived at trumpstruth.org/statuses/42683), quoted verbatim under 50 words. Wedgewood admission and FiftyPlusOne investigation: TBS News (Oct 2026). NYT editors' note: 15 Wedgewood surveys (June–October), all removed. McMorrow fundraising account: as stated by the candidate. Vetting dispute: nanobyte.site / VoteHub reporting; FiftyPlusOne and VoteHub statements; Zachary Donnini (VoteHub head of data science). FCC Chair Brendan Carr statement and AAPOR warning: as reported. Voter-trust figures: NYT/Siena poll via pollar.news (~73% trust election accuracy; 23% do not, up from 17% for 2024). Trump's lawsuit references and characterizations of the Times ("got caught," "Failing New York Times," "ARTIFICIAL") are his claims/opinions, attributed to him. Analysis and motive assessments are the author's interpretation, clearly separated from reported facts.