Arnold Schwarzenegger Says Donald Trump Is 'In Love' With Him: 'He Wants to Be Me'

Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gabriel Luna are on the cover of Men’s Health‘s October 2019 issue, out now.

Here’s what the 72-year-old former Governor of California had to say…

On Donald Trump’s public ridicule of his low-rated stint as the replacement host of NBC’s Celebrity Apprentice: “He’s in love with me. That’s the reality of it. With Trump, he wants to be me…I don’t think he fears me. But 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 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. How do you do this when you do interviews – that you penetrate through it and you then are totally believable?”

On what governorship taught him about himself: “I always complain 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. 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. 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.”

On how the Terminator won people over: “People really admired the character, because he was able to do things they all wanted to do. Everyone wants to wipe out the police station – because it was not a human being doing it, it was the machine doing it.”

For more from Arnold, head to MensHealth.com.