President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he was lonely spending the holidays in Washington during the partial government shutdown, but seemed to take comfort in his claims of historic popularity

"I was in the White House all by myself for six or seven days," Trump said during a Cabinet meeting, which stretched for nearly 90 minutes as cameras rolled. "It was very lonely. My family was down in Florida. I said stay there and enjoy yourself. I felt I should be here just in case people wanted to come and negotiate the border security."

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“It's too important a subject to walk away from. I was here on Christmas evening. I was all by myself in the White House. It's a big, big house — except for the guys on the lawn with machine guns,” he said, veering into a tangent about the guns his Secret Service protection carries.

“Nicest machine guns I’ve ever seen. I was waving to them. I never saw so many guys with machine guns in my life. Secret Service and military. These are great people. They don't play games, they don’t, like, wave. But I was all alone with the machine gunners. I felt very safe, I have to tell you. There's a lot of them. I was hoping somebody would come back and negotiate. They didn't do that.”

Trump added that he thought his job would be “a lot easier if I just relaxed and enjoyed the presidency like a lot of other people have done.”