Trump says 'NO WAY' Obama would have beaten him

Donald Trump.
(Image credit: Steve Pope/Getty Images)

President Obama said in an interview released Monday that he was "confident" he would have beaten President-elect Donald Trump in November if he could have run for a third term. Obama praised his fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton and said she had faced unfair attacks, but that she campaigned too cautiously out of a belief that she was certain to beat Trump. "If you think you're winning, then you have a tendency, just like in sports, maybe to play it safer," Obama said to his former adviser David Axelrod for his The Axe Files podcast.

Trump responded thusly:

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The president-elect soon followed up by tweeting, "The world was gloomy before I won — there was no hope. Now the market is up nearly 10% and Christmas spending is over a trillion dollars!"

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Harold Maass

Harold Maass is a contributing editor at TheWeek.com. He has been writing for The Week since the 2001 launch of the U.S. print edition. Harold has worked for a variety of news outlets, including The Miami Herald, Fox News, and ABC News. For several years, he wrote a daily round-up of financial news for The Week and Yahoo Finance. He lives in North Carolina with his wife and two sons.