Trump: ‘I will be best for this country’

Donald Trump is confident he would be be a better president than any other Republican candidate, he said in an interview that will air tomorrow morning.

Trump, the reality TV star and real estate mogul, declined to explicitly go negative against any of his possible competitors for the Republican presidential nomination, but said he’s confident he’d be a better president than any of them.

“I will be better than anybody. I will do the best job. If I decide to run, I will do the best job. I will be best for this country,” Trump said in an interview airing Thursday on NBC’s “Today” show.

“And, you may say, ‘Oh, gee, that doesn’t sound like George Washington,'” Trump added. “Well, guess what? Before George Washington ran, he didn’t sound like George Washington either. I will be and do a great job, if I run and if I win.”

The host of NBC’s “The Apprentice” has been openly flirting with running; he’s made a number of media appearances as of late, and sent an adviser to Iowa to gauge support in that state’s first-in-the-nation nominating caucuses.

Trump’s also garnered a significant bit of attention by giving voice to “birther” sentiments, openly questioning the authenticity of President Obama’s birth certificate and Obama’s eligibility to be president.

The attention has apparently been enough to vault him into a tie for second place among Republican primary voters. Seventeen percent of Republicans said they would vote for Trump as their nominee, found a NBC/Wall Street Journal poll released Wednesday evening.

Trump’s said he’ll decide in June whether to run, but talked up the possibility of his candidacy, saying the time was right for a run.

“Well, the time certainly is right. We’re a laughing stock as a country throughout the world. We’re being taken advantage of by other countries,” he said.