. FACT-CHECK: Trump Would Get CRUSHED By George Washington and Abraham Lincoln Concludes Washington Post Analysis - News Times

FACT-CHECK: Trump Would Get CRUSHED By George Washington and Abraham Lincoln Concludes Washington Post Analysis

By News Here - 12:09

Trump Brags a Pollster Once Told Him He Would Crush George Washington and Abraham Lincoln Combined — By 40 Percent

L: Jeff Swensen/Getty Images, C: Hulton Archive/Getty Images, R: MPI/Getty Images

A detailed analysis by The Washington Post concludes that despite former President Donald Trump‘s insistence to the contrary, he would lose badly if he ran for president against George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.

Trump recently told the America First Policy Institute (AFPI) Hispanic Leadership Conference in Miami, Florida that pollster John Mclaughlin once told him “Sir, if George Washington and Abraham Lincoln came alive from the dead and they formed a president-vice president team, you would beat them by 40%.”

WaPo’s Philip Bump decided to put McLaughlin’s claim — or Trump’s claim of McLaughlin’s claim — to the test with a lengthy fact-check that included some surprising findings.

For example, Bump found that “The Constitution doesn’t actually prohibit dead people from being elected as president”:

Its only related stipulation is that, to be president, someone must have resided in the U.S. for 14 years. Had the term been “lived” in the U.S., we’d have a problem. But “residing” doesn’t require “living,” and both Washington and Lincoln have been present in the U.S. (in Virginia and Illinois, respectively) for well over 14 years.

But Bump notes that a Democratic Party rule requiring a written declaration could be an obstacle — “tricky for Washington and Lincoln because a) they were not Democrats and b) they are dead.”

He also never even bothers to explain how they’d get Jim Clyburn to endorse that ticket. That would be one hell of a debate night in South Carolina.

As it turns out, the biggest stumbling block — the fatal one, as it were — is that they are both constitutionally term-limited, and thus ineligible to run for president.

But if they did, Bump’s analysis reveals, they would crush Trump:

Thanks to YouGov, we can actually address Trump’s theoretical more directly. In 2021 — admittedly not before the pandemic — the pollsters asked Americans how they viewed past presidents. Both Washington and Lincoln received high marks, landing in the third and first all-time favorability slots, respectively. Trump landed at 20, just under Gerald Ford.

Among all Americans, Trump trailed Washington on favorability by 31 points. Among Democrats, it was 59 points. Even among Republicans, Washington fared better.

And that’s ignoring that lots of Americans — for very understandable reasons — didn’t have an opinion on Washington or Lincoln. If we look at the favorability of each former president just within the group of people with an opinion, both Washington and Lincoln pull further away from Trump. In the GOP, Trump trails Washington by 11 points and Lincoln by 8 points.

Trump won’t have to face a Washington/Lincoln ticket, and so the world will never know how Republican voters would have reacted to rants about “Lyin’ George” or “Sleepy Abe” and his wife “Crazy Mary.”

The post FACT-CHECK: Trump Would Get CRUSHED By George Washington and Abraham Lincoln Concludes Washington Post Analysis first appeared on Mediaite.

from Mediaite https://ift.tt/OINwxoj

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