In the past, US President Donald Trump often flirted with the idea of running for office, but he then always turned down the claims he had an actual desire of doing so. During the 2016 presidential campaign, he used his past apolitical life in his favour. Speaking at his first rally in New Hampshire in 2017, he told a crowd in Manchester that because he was “a businessman and not a politician”, he was the only one able solve the nation’s problems.
However, in interviews included in 2017 British documentary “Trump: An American Dream”, Mr Trump’s words reveal that the business tycoon suggested that he did want to be a politician but he was just waiting for the right time to pursue the presidency and win.
When asked by gossip columnist Rona Barret in the late Seventies what he would do if he lost his fortune, Mr Trump promptly replied: “Maybe I would run for President, I don’t know.”
He then immediately corrected himself, saying: “No, I am only kidding. When I say that I am being somewhat facetious.”
Nevertheless, he arguably revealed the strategy that paved his road to the White House in a 1987 interview, during which he was discussing the “world’s tallest building”, a project that never materialised.
The interviewer asked him: “What if you don’t get this? What is going to happen to this?”
He rebutted: “Then what I’ll do is I’ll wait for a more progressive administration and more importantly I’ll wait for bad times.
“When bad times come then I’ll get whatever I want.”
During an interview with Oprah the subsequent year, the American firebrand claimed that he would only run for President if times got “bad”.
He told her: “I just probably wouldn’t do it, Oprah.
“I probably wouldn’t, but I do get tired of seeing what’s happening with this country, and if it got so bad, I would never want to rule it out totally, because I really am tired of seeing what’s happening with this country, how we’re really making other people live like kings, and we’re not.
“I think I’d win. I tell you what, I wouldn’t go in to lose.”