President Donald Trump brushed off speculation Thursday that he might choose to stand down instead of running for re-election in 2020, telling the New York Times in an interview: “I love this job.”
He also rejected the idea that he was personally profiting from the Presidency. “I lost massive amounts of money doing this job,” he said.
According to Forbes, Trump’s net worth dropped from $4.5 billion in 2015 to $3.1 billion in 2018, although Forbes reported that part of that drop could be because of deeper analysis of the President’s finances.
Trump added that he doubted he would face a Republican challenger for the party nomination. “I don’t see it,” he told the Times. “I have great support in the party.”
He said that his support among Republicans was “among the highest polls ever in the history of the Republican party.” He went on, “we’ve had polls as high as 93%, which is the highest there is.”
That assertion isn’t accurate, however.
Trump’s approval rating among Republicans peaked at 89% in October 2018, according to Gallup’s Presidential Job Approval Center. By contrast, President George W. Bush enjoyed a 99% approval rating among Republicans shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks. In polls of all adults, President Trump currently has an approval rating of some 38.9%, according to FiveThirtyEight.
In the rest of the wide-ranging interview with the Times, Trump also called talks with Democrats over his signature border wall plan a “waste of time,” and expressed confidence he was not personally under investigation in the Mueller probe.
