President Trump says it would be “a dream” to run against former Vice President Joe Biden in 2020.
In an interview that aired Thursday on CBS, Trump was asked who’d be his toughest opponent in two years.
“I dream about Biden, that’s a dream. Look, Joe Biden ran three times, he never got more than 1 percent and President Obama took him out of the garbage heap and everybody was shocked that he did. I’d love to have it be Biden,” Trump responded.
Biden — who has only run for president twice, in 1988 and 2008 — is a vocal Trump critic, most recently saying the president’s press conference with Vladimir Putin in Finland was “beneath the dignity of the office of the president.”
A CNN poll from January shows Biden topping Trump by 17 points in a hypothetical matchup, 57 to 40 percent.
Trump and Biden have traded insults before.
“When a guy who ended up becoming our national leader said, ‘I can grab a woman anywhere and she likes it’ and then said, ‘I made a mistake,'” Biden said at the University of Miami in March, referencing Trump’s infamous off-camera remarks that were filmed by “Access Hollywood.”
“They asked me would I like to debate this gentleman, and I said no. I said, ‘If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him.'”
Biden added: “I’ve been in a lot of locker rooms my whole life. I’m a pretty damn good athlete.”
The longtime Delaware senator was referencing the initial defense from the Trump campaign of the tape, which attempted to explain away the developer’s claim that his celebrity allowed him to grab women by the privates without their permission as “locker room talk.”
“Crazy Joe Biden is trying to act like a tough guy,” Trump then shot back on Twitter. “Actually, he is weak, both mentally and physically, and yet he threatens me, for the second time, with physical assault. He doesn’t know me, but he would go down fast and hard, crying all the way.”
Trump expressed confidence about facing off against other potential Democratic 2020 contenders, without mentioning any by name.
“I think I’d like to have any one of those people that we’re talking about, there’s probably the group of seven or eight right now, I’d like to run against any one of them,” Trump said.
Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon named Oprah Winfrey as Trump’s biggest threat — even though the former queen of daytime TV declared she’s not running.
“I think we’re in a different era,” Bannon said Wednesday night on CNBC. “I think we’re in an era that media and understanding media and understanding how to communicate on a mass basis to the American people is so much more important than being in a state legislature.”
