Playing like a broken record label, Donald Trump has narrated the story of “two pollsters” praising him in 2020 again. This is probably the fifth time and counting, and he still hasn’t realized the ridiculousness of his story.
Speaking at the U.S.-Saudi investment forum at the Kennedy Center on Wednesday, Trump brought his favorite story back to the crowd. A day before COVID-19 was announced, two pollsters supposedly walked into his office with history-shattering news. “Sir, if George Washington and Abraham Lincoln came back from the dead… you’d be beating them by 25 points,” they said.
Trump, obviously, couldn’t forget the moment. And he has been recounting it ever since. In a 2021 interview, Trump told Washington Post reporters that even a Washington-Lincoln team can’t beat him. Then, in 2022, at a Hispanic leadership conference in Miami, he upgraded the boast (via The Independent). He said that a “famous pollster” (John McLaughlin, by the way) told him he’d beat the duo by 40 percent.
Now, in 2025, the resurrected Founders are back again, and the margin has changed to 25 points. The only constant that remains is Trump’s need to retell the same heroic fable. Most recently, before the forum, he bragged about the story to Fox News just nine months back:
“The day before we heard that word, I had a meeting with political people and pollsters, and everything else. they said, ‘Sir, if George Washington and Abraham Lincoln got together and ran as President and Vice President, they couldn’t beat you.'”
Commendably for his demented brain, he hasn’t changed the script one bit. On Wednesday, he used almost the same lines sequentially, but soon pivoted into a wandering COVID monologue. He then cast the pandemic as the tragic twist in a movie where he was otherwise destined to shine. In other words, he put all the blame for his loss in the 2020 elections on COVID-19.
Meanwhile, reality refuses to cooperate with his imaginary pollsters. In early 2020, Trump’s approval sat at around 42–43%, not 25 points above a dream opponent (via Gallup). Even in the 2024 race, Kamala Harris led Trump by 1–3 points heading into Election Day (via Reuters). Though he ultimately edged her at 50% to 48% (via Guardian), it’s not exactly Washington-and-Lincoln levels of dominance.
Users on X summed up the entire genre of Trump anecdotes with a single rule of thumb. “The second he starts a quote with ‘Sir…’ he’s lying.” Others joked about “pollsters living in his head,” since nobody knows Trump’s supposed sources besides him. In essence, a man who barely scrapes by modern opponents shouldn’t daydream about humiliating the two greatest presidents in U.S. history.
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