President Donald Trump told his former fixer and personal attorney, Michael Cohen, that he believes he would win in a record landslide if he ran for reelection, despite his low approval ratings.
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Washington observers find the claim to be risible.
“If I were running today, I think I’d win by 25 points,” Trump told Michael Cohen on the latter’s radio show on Thursday. “I think we’d win by a lot. The economy has never been stronger.”
In response, former Republican attorney and ex-husband to Trump’s first term counsel Kellyanne Conway, George Conway, posted on X, “Lmaoooooo.”
Similarly former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL), who used to support Trump, posted “Pathetic. Both of these guys.”
Meanwhile journalist Ben Jacobs wrote “No one is better at incisive interviews than @speechboy71.”
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Since presidential popular votes were tabulated in 1824, only three presidents have won an election by a margin of roughly 25 points: Warren Harding in 1920, Calvin Coolidge in 1924 and Franklin Roosevelt in 1936. Trump, by contrast, won by a margin of less than 1.5 percent in 2024, which was his largest margin. He lost the popular vote by more than 2 percent and nearly 4.5 percent in 2016 and 2020, respectively.
If Trump ran for reelection in 2028, based on his current polling numbers, it is unlikely he would even do that well. As Republican strategist Karl Rove wrote earlier this week, Trump’s approval ratings are extremely low.
“Mr. Trump is unpopular,” Rove wrote for The Wall Street Journal. “His approval in the RealClearPolitics average is 39 [percent]. A season of political rallies won’t improve that. Less campaigning might.”
He continued, “It makes no sense to help Democrats more easily tie a Republican candidate to voters’ low opinion of Mr. Trump. Get the president to raise money at private fundraisers but avoid high-profile rallies in battlegrounds that will only energize an already excited Democratic electorate and make it more difficult for Republicans to contrast themselves with their opponents.”
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