‘Beating them by 25 points’: Trump thinks he’d win against the Founding Fathers, but 76% of voters are too broke to care

At the U.S.–Saudi investment forum at the Kennedy Center on Wednesday, November 19, President Donald Trump revived one of his most sweeping fantasies about his electability. He once again claimed he’d been two of history’s most famous presidents, including a founding father.

But Trump’s boast comes as a Fox News poll shows Americans have a different number in mind. According to Fox News’ findings, 76% of voters rate the national economy under Trump as “fair” or “poor,” a significant number given Fox News’ typical demographic.

With numbers like that, Trump’s fantasy of beating a Washington-Lincoln ticket raises serious questions about whether Trump can tell fiction from reality.

“If George Washington and Abraham Lincoln came back from the dead”

According to footage shared online, Trump told U.S.–Saudi investment forum attendees that pollsters once assured him he would defeat the George Washington and Abraham Lincoln ticket by a wide margin.

In 2020, Trump said, “I met with pollsters the day before I got the news about COVID. They said, ‘Sir, if George Washington and Abraham Lincoln came back from the dead, and they aligned and they went for the president, vice president as a combination. You’d be beating them by 25 points.’”

Notably, Trump lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by 2.1% in 2016, and Kamala Harris bested Trump by 1.5% in 2024.

Trump said similar things before

Trump has used variations of the Washington–Lincoln anecdote for years, often presenting it as evidence of unparalleled popularity and political dominance. In 2022, at the Hispanic Leadership Conference in Miami, he said a “very famous pollster” told him he would win against the two historic presidents by 40%.

Earlier in his presidency, he also claimed—incorrectly—that he had achieved the highest Republican poll numbers since Lincoln, a comparison fact-checkers noted was impossible to verify because scientific polling did not exist in the 1800s.

Here’s the number he should be worried about

Trump’s braggadocio stands in sharp contrast to voter sentiment measured in a new Fox News poll, which finds that 76% of voters “rate the current economy as ‘fair’ or ‘poor’,” reflecting widespread financial strain among Americans.

The Fox News survey shows dissatisfaction cutting across demographic and income levels, with especially negative views from households earning under $50,000. The numbers highlight a gap between Trump’s rhetorical focus on personal performance and the day-to-day financial anxieties shaping public opinion.

For Trump, comparisons to Washington, Lincoln, and other iconic leaders have long served as a political device to bolster his narrative of exceptionalism and inevitability. The return of that message underscores the degree to which his campaign continues to lean on personality-driven claims even as economic problems remain a primary concern for voters.