Trump claims he would beat a Washington-Lincoln ticket by 40 points

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Donald Trump cited a pollster and claimed he would beat George Washington and Abraham Lincoln “by 40 per cent”, if they teamed up as president and vice president.

The former president made the remarks during a speech at the Hispanic leadership conference in Miami, Florida on Wednesday.

Mr Trump said “famous pollster John McLaughlin” told him just before the pandemic that “if George Washington and Abraham Lincoln came alive from the dead and formed a president, vice president team, you would beat them by 40 per cent”.

“The numbers were numbers that nobody could even believe,” said the one-time president.

“That’s how good our numbers were. I’ll never forget that because that would be a tough tandem, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln... ‘Ladies and gentlemen, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln have announced that they will be running for president and vice president.’ I would say, ‘Oh man, that’s tough, that’s a tough one.’”

At the same event, he falsely accused his predecessor Barack Obama of moving “33 million pages” of official documents to a “totally unsafe former furniture store” after demitting the Oval Office.

The former president also railed against US federal agencies probing his handling of sensitive government records.

He claimed the FBI’s search of his Mar-a-Lago estate is being used to “unjustly, illegally and unconstitutionally” target him as he called the federal investigation a “hoax”.

“The document hoax is just that. It’s a hoax and a charade and am being unjustly, illegally, and unconstitutionally being targeted. It is a violation of the 4th amendment, you know,” Mr Trump said at the conference.

Mr Trump recently filed a defamation lawsuit against CNN and is seeking $475m in punitive damages.