Former Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe said he would be the Democratic Party's best bet to challenge President Donald Trump in 2020 in an interview with The Washington Free Beacon published on Monday.
"Who better to take on Trump than me?" McAuliffe said when asked about a potential 2020 run for president, strongly indicating he will indeed make a bid for the White House.
McAuliffe, who is also a former Democratic National Committee chairman, as well as the campaign chairman for presidential runs by both Bill and Hillary Clinton, earlier this month dodged a question on CNN on who he thought would give Democrats the best chance to recapture the presidency or when he would make a decision about running.
McAuliffe is regularly included among the numerous Democrats considering being a candidate for the presidency. However, in a Rasmussen Reports poll in November, he was the choice of only two percent of Democratic voters for whom they thought would make the best candidate against Trump, finishing in sixth place. Former Vice President Joe Biden was the most popular choice, at 41 percent.
But McAuliffe insisted to the Free Beacon that he knows he can stand up to Trump because he has known him for a long time, including playing golf with him numerous times. Trump even gave him $25,000 for his unsuccessful 2009 bid for governor of Virginia.
Last month, McAuliffe told MSNBC's Chris Matthews that if Trump tried to intimidate him, "you would have to pick him up off the floor."
When asked by Matthews if he was saying he would "deck him," McAuliffe said, "Listen, if this guy got in my space, you wanna get in my space, I've always said Chris, you punch me, I'm going to punch back twice as hard.
"And it wouldn't be hard to do it, but you know, this guy thinks he could intimidate everybody. It's disgraceful. It's embarrassing."
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