Why Trump Would Tell His Younger Self Not to Run for President
If he could, President Donald Trump would give his 25-year-old self one significant and life-altering piece of advice: “don’t run for president.”
Trump jokingly admitted to a crowd of young Republicans that he would advise his younger self not to run for president because of the bad publicity he’s been getting.
“All my life I got the greatest publicity, until I ran for office,” he said. “But people get it, people really do get it. There is a lot of fake news out there and I actually am proud of the fact that I exposed it to a large extent, because we exposed it. It’s an achievement.”
The president addressed a broad range of topics during a session at the Generation Next Forum, a White House event for millennials that also featured conversations with Ivanka Trump and senior adviser Kellyanne Conway.
When asked about free speech on campus Trump said he believed that college campuses are far less liberal than many people suggest. “If you look at what’s going on with free speech with the super left, with Antifa, with all of these characters, I tell you what, they get a lot of publicity,” he said. “But if you go to the real campuses and you go all over this country, out to the Middle West or even to the coast in many cases, we have tremendous support and majority support. I think this is highly overblown.”
The president also remarked that he supports an increase in the use of vocational schools, which he said were good for Americans who are “good at fixing motors” and “not going to be Einstein academically.”
Trump admitted to the crowd that he wasn’t sure if his popularity with the Republican base would transfer to the 2018 Midterm elections. The president mentioned his attendance at rallies in Pensacola, Florida where he endorsed Alabama Senate loser Roy Moore and in Pennsylvania where he endorsed Congressional loser Rick Saccone, “I don’t know if it’s transferable, I’m not sure if it is,” he said. “They all like me, they’re all going to vote for me and say I’m going to do great in 2020 but they don’t know if it’s transferable. I hope it is because we have to do our agenda in 2018 and win, we need more Republicans.”
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He ended with a criticism of 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s recent remarks on women voting for Trump because their husbands told them to. “That was not too good,” he said.