Donald Trump says all negative polls about him are fake news

A CNN survey found he has the worst early approval rating of any US President in history

'What do you think, our country's so innocent?' Mr Trump replied when told Mr Putin is a killer (AFP/Getty)

Donald Trump has hit out at recent polls suggesting he has one of the worst early approval ratings in US history, saying that "any negative polls are fake news".

A CNN/ORC International poll released on Friday found Mr Trump had the lowest approval rating of any new President, at 44 per cent.

Mr Trump wrote on Twitter: "Any negative polls are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election. Sorry, people want border security and extreme vetting."

In a second tweet he continued to rail against the "FAKE NEWS media" which he accused of spreading "lies".

"I call my own shots, largely based on an accumulation of data, and everyone knows it," he wrote.

Another survey carried out over the weekend by Gallup, which has polled for every US president since Dwight D Eisenhower, put his approval rating even lower, at 42 per cent.

His disapproval rating also jumped from 50 to 53 per cent. Gallup said it was a record low for a president just two weeks into office.

By comparison, Barack Obama polled around 76 per cent after his first 14 days in charge – the highest of any recent president – while George W Bush was on 58 per cent and Bill Clinton achieved 59 per cent.

Mr Trump faced an angry backlash to a string of executive orders he signed in the first days of his presidency, with opposition to his travel ban on seven majority-Muslim countries and the promise to build a wall between the US and Mexico triggering the fiercest public outrage.

The CNN poll also found that the number of people who disagreed “strongly” with the new President’s actions was almost as large as the total number who approved.

However, the survey did show a slight improvement on polling carried out before his inauguration in mid-January, when he was on a 40 per cent approval rating.

On the economy and national security, a majority of those polled said they approved of Mr Trump’s policies.

But on each of the other questions put to the sample, from terrorism and immigration to health care and foreign affairs, a majority said they disapproved of his administration’s policies.

Around a third of those asked said they would like to see the so-called ‘Muslim ban’ expanded, but 53 per cent opposed it entirely.

And almost half of respondents said it harmed American values and would make the country less safe from terrorism.

The President regularly cited polling by all the major stations during his election campaign, and once claimed to have "won" a CBS post-debate poll when no such poll had taken place.

And he has previously admitted to being selective about his faith in political surveys. In October last year he said: "When we do badly, I don't talk about the polls. When we're doing well, I talk about the polls."