Arnold Schwarzenegger Breaks Down His Beef With Donald Trump, And It’s Actually About Love

Actor Arnold Schwarzenegger mocked Donald Trump, suggesting in a new interview that the president won’t drop their yearslong beef because he actually “wants to be me.”

“I think he really — he’s in love with me,” the former governor of California told Men’s Health in a piece published online Tuesday. “That’s the reality of it. With Trump, he wants to be me.” 

Schwarzenegger replaced Trump as host of the “Celebrity Apprentice” in 2017 and the ratings promptly fell ― a fact the president has repeatedly reminded “The Terminator” star about. Schwarzenegger, meanwhile, has frequently criticized Trump and his administration ― particularly for its anti-environmental agenda.

Schwarzenegger said Trump used to respect him and recalled his earlier relationship with the then-businessman.

“I remember that in the old days, when we went to the wrestling matches, the way he admired people with bodies, and the way they would jump around in the ring, and to perform physical stunts and stuff like that,” he said. “He had great admiration for that.”

“He asked me, ‘How do you do that, with the movies? I mean, it’s so believable.’ He drilled down to specific questions that fascinated him. It was about, ‘How do you sell something?’ Like, a scene. ‘How do you go and act out a scene so that I get affected emotionally?’ He was fascinated by that, Schwarzenegger remembered. ”‘How do you do this when you do interviews – that you penetrate through it and you then are totally believable?’”

Elsewhere in the interview, Schwarzenegger explained why he often complains about Trump “not being able to shift from Trump to president.”

“Well, the reason why I say this is because I saw that with myself, that I was not able to shift from Arnold to governor. I was still stuck as Arnold,” he noted.

“Arnold always gets things done. I forced my way in there, then I do it and do it and do it and do it, until it gets done. And I felt the same thing I can do with politics,” Schwarzenegger said. “But I learned quickly that that’s really not the way it works. You got to be able to bring people together. It takes much more time, much more effort, but that’s just the way it is. If you don’t like that, don’t get into politics.”

Read the full interview here.