Tom Steyer to Iowa Voters: ‘I Don’t Want to Be President’

Left-wing billionaire Democrat donor-turned-presidential candidate Tom Steyer told an audience in Northwood, Iowa, on Monday: “I don’t want to be president.”

Rather, he said, he wanted to “do things as president,” though it was not clear how he squared those two statements.

Steer’s comments, courtesy of NBC’s Maura Barrett:

Well, let me say this. I know this is going to sound a little strange, kind of: I don’t want to be president. But I do want to do things as president. You know, I am running because I thought — until this week, I was the last person to get in. And I got in because I thought, “My God, no one’s going to tell the truth to the American people. And we’re not going to actually deal with the critical issues in front of us, and we have to.” So the two things I can tell you, for sure: one is, if I’m not the Democratic candidate, I will be supporting the Democratic candidate. Full bore. Any one of those people on that stage is a thousand times better than Mr. Trump or any of the Republicans. Really. I believe that, and I will, there is 100% probability that I will be supporting that person as hard as I can. The second thing I’d say is this: if I’m not the Democratic candidate, that doesn’t mean we aren’t in a climate crisis! We are! I’ve been fighting it for a decade and more! I’m not going to suddenly go, like, “Wooo! Hawaii, here I come!” No. And I’m not going o suddenly thing that — look, if you had told me, when I was a kid, that I thought that American democracy was at risk, and it wasn’t the scariest thing ever, I would have said, “You’re crazy! That’s the worst thing I can imagine happening. I can’t imagine anything worse than that.” That’s because I couldn’t imagine the climate crisis. But there is no way, having seen what I’ve seen, and talked to the people that I’ve talked to, and seen the cruelty exhibited towards the American people, that I’m going to stop fighting these people. No way! I don’t think of myself as a tough person, but I can tell you: I don’t like mean people. They don’t scare me. And I’m very angry about it. There is a playbook here that is cruel to Americans. Intentionally so.

Steyer also released his new housing policy, the Des Moines Register reported. He spoke last week to Breitbart News in the spin room after the Democrat debate in Atlanta, Georgia, about his comment that he wanted to “force” cities to build more housing.

Steyer said he would use the term “regulation” as an alternative to “force.”

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.