President Donald Trump told his former fixer and personal attorney, Michael Cohen, that he believes he would win in a record landslide if he ran for reelection today — a claim Washington observers find risible given his low approval ratings.

"If I were running today, I think I'd win by 25 points," Trump said Thursday on Cohen's radio show. "I think we'd win by a lot. The economy has never been stronger."

The setting was itself notable: Cohen, once among Trump's most loyal defenders, pleaded guilty in 2018 to federal charges including campaign-finance violations, served time in prison, and later testified against his former boss before Congress.

The remark drew immediate mockery. George Conway, a former Republican attorney, the ex-husband of Trump's first-term counselor Kellyanne Conway, and a persistent conservative critic of the president, responded on X with a single word: "Lmaoooooo."

Former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL), who once supported Trump before turning against him and challenging him for the 2020 Republican nomination, posted, "Pathetic. Both of these guys." Journalist Ben Jacobs wrote, "No one is better at incisive interviews than @speechboy71" — a reference to Cohen's handle on the platform.

Historical election data underscores how improbable the claim is. Since presidential popular votes were first tabulated in 1824, only three presidents have won by a margin of roughly 25 points: Warren Harding in 1920, Calvin Coolidge in 1924, and Franklin Roosevelt in 1936. Trump, by contrast, won by a margin of less than 1.5 percent in 2024 — his largest — and lost the popular vote by more than 2 percent in 2016 and nearly 4.5 percent in 2020.

Based on his current polling numbers, a Trump reelection bid in 2028 would be unlikely to match even those results — and it would first confront a constitutional barrier: the 22nd Amendment bars any person from being elected president more than twice, a threshold Trump reached with his wins in 2016 and 2024. As Karl Rove, the Republican strategist who directed George W. Bush's two winning presidential campaigns, wrote earlier this week in The Wall Street Journal, Trump's approval ratings are extremely low.

"Mr. Trump is unpopular," Rove wrote. "His approval in the RealClearPolitics average is 39 [percent]. A season of political rallies won't improve that. Less campaigning might."

"It makes no sense to help Democrats more easily tie a Republican candidate to voters' low opinion of Mr. Trump," Rove continued. "Get the president to raise money at private fundraisers but avoid high-profile rallies in battlegrounds that will only energize an already excited Democratic electorate and make it more difficult for Republicans to contrast themselves with their opponents."