President Trump declared that he is not “prepared to lose” reelection in 2020, saying he does not believe the official results of the popular vote count from his first election.
When asked if he was prepared to lose in an interview with told NBC’s “Meet the Press” that aired Sunday, Trump said, “No. Probably not.”
“It would be much better if I said, ‘Yeah.’ It would be much easier for me to say, ‘Oh yes,’” Trump offered, but said, “No, I’m probably not too prepared to lose. I don’t like losing. I haven’t lost very much in my life.”
“You didn’t like the fact that you lost the popular vote?” asked “Meet the Press” host Chuck Todd. “That bothered you, didn’t it.”
RELATED: How every state voted in the 2016 election
“I’ll say something that, again, is controversial,” Trump said. “There were a lot of votes that I don’t believe.”
“There was much illegal voting,” he added, vaguely referring to California and a settlement by Judicial Watch requiring Los Angeles County to remove as many as 1.5 million inactive registrations as a part of a “massive voter roll clean-up.”
There is no evidence that ballots were cast in the names of any of the inactive voters.
This wasn’t the first time Trump — who in 2016 lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton by nearly 3 million votes and carried the Electoral College with 304 votes — has claimed that he won the popular vote.
A few weeks after the 2016 election, Trump tweeted, “In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”
“I like popular vote,” said Trump, who is one of five presidents to win a presidential election while losing the popular vote. “I think I’d do better with the popular vote. But I didn’t campaign for the popular vote. You didn’t see me campaigning in California or New York.”
Trump added: “If it was up to the popular vote, I would have done, I think, even better. I won 306 to 223, which is a lot in the Electoral College, but it’s like you’re training for the 100-yard dash versus the mile.” (In the past, he compared winning the Electoral College to a marathon.)
Trump recently came out in favor of the Electoral College, which he called “a disaster for democracy” in 2012. In April, he changed his mind, saying it’s “far better for the U.S.A.”
Still, he argued in his interview that “the Electoral College is tougher for a Republican to win than the popular vote, at least me.”
Meanwhile, Democrats, including presidential candidates, have called for an end to the Electoral College and choosing the president by popular vote.
Trump credited his 2016 victory to campaigning in states where his Democratic opponent Clinton “didn’t do a good job,” such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
“They always say she was a lousy candidate,”Trump said. “I actually think that Hillary Clinton was a great candidate. She was very smart, she was very tough, she was ruthless and vicious.”
When asked if he would rather run against Clinton again, Trump said, “No. I would actually rather run against Biden. I think that would be my preference.’
‘Why?” asked Todd, who pointed out that Trump “referred to Hillary Clinton more than Trump’s would-be 2020 opponents’ in his campaign announcement speech last Tuesday.
“Sleepy Joe,” Trump responded. “He’s sleepy. She was not sleepy.”
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