In recent weeks, we’ve learned that Donald Trump reportedly wanted the person who leaked him hiding in an underground bunker to be “executed,” flipped out on his legal team over typos, and told his then-chief-of-staff that Hitler did “a lot of good things.”
Those shocking anecdotes all came from inside sources, published in tell-all books, and not directly from the former-president himself (hence the “reportedly”). But it’s believable that Trump would say those things, considering he claimed — on the record, mind you — that he would defeat George Washington/Abraham Lincoln in a presidential election. This, from a man who lost to Joe Biden by over seven million votes.
In an interview with Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker for their book I Alone Can Fix It, Trump said that his presidency was split in two: pre-pandemic and during the pandemic. “In the first, when the economy was roaring, Trump argued that he had been unbeatable, never mind that his approval rating was never higher than 46 percent in the Gallup poll during his first three years as president,” an excerpt published in Vanity Fair reads:
“I think it would be hard if George Washington came back from the dead and he chose Abraham Lincoln as his vice president, I think it would have been very hard for them to beat me,” Trump said.
Trump was recently named the fourth worst president ever by a group of 142 historians and professional observers. Lincoln finished first, followed closely by Washington.
Besides the obvious WTF-ness of this statement, my favorite part is that Trump clarified that Washington would have to come “back from the dead,” but he didn’t offer the same invitation to Lincoln. Maybe he meant another Abraham Lincoln, like one of the three people with that name who haven’t been dead for 156 years. That’s probably it. Even Trump knows he doesn’t have a chance against Zombies Washington and Lincoln 2024.
(Via Vanity Fair)