Donald Trump said he probably could beat George Washington in an election, even with Abraham Lincoln as his running mate

• Donald Trump said he could beat George Washington in an election, even with Abraham Lincoln as running mate.
• He made the comments to Washington Post journalists in an interview for their new book, "I Alone Can Fix It."
• Washington and Lincoln are often ranked as the two greatest presidents in American history.

Donald Trump told journalists that he believed he could beat George Washington and Abraham Lincoln in an election.

"I think it would be hard if George Washington came back from the dead and he chose Abraham Lincoln as his vice-president, I think it would have been very hard for them to beat me," Trump told Washington Post journalists Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig.

Rucker and Leonnig recounted the comment in their new book about Trump, "I Alone Can Fix It," according to a review by The Guardian.

Lincoln and Washington are often ranked by historians as the two greatest presidents in US history.

By comparison, some polls have shown that nearly half of all Americans believe Donald Trump was the worst president in the country's history.

Trump is also the only US president to have been impeached twice.

This is not the first time Donald Trump has fantasized about beating George Washington at the ballot box.

Before the presidential election last year Trump told conservative talk show host Hugh Hewitt that he could have beaten Washington in an election if not for COVID-19.

"I don't know if you've seen, the polls have been going up like a rocket ship. George Washington would have had a hard time beating me before the plague came in, before the China plague," Trump said.

"I Alone Can Fix It" will be Leonnig and Rucker's second book about Trump, after chronicling the first three years of his presidency in "A Very Stable Genius."

According to The Guardian review, Trump felt burned by the authors' first book but decided to sit with them for a two-and-a-half-hour interview for their second book.

At the end of the interview, he told them with a "twinkle in his eye" that "for some sick reason" he "enjoyed it," the paper said.