Arnold Schwarzenegger Responds to Trump's Latest Jabs: "I Have Thick Skin"

"I'm not a Trump Republican, that's why I didn't vote for him," he told Van Jones on CNN.

Arnold Schwarzenegger isn't letting the president's put-downs get to him.

While appearing on CNN's Messy Truth town hall hosted by Van Jones on Wednesday night, Schwarzenegger explained that he stands by his comments about President Donald Trump, but Trump's tweets and insults directed at him don't bother him very much at all.

When Jones asked what Schwarzenegger thought about Trump’s latest jabs about his performance on Celebrity Apprentice, he said, “I have thick skin, this doesn’t bother me at all. It's very funny. One third of the audience left because they boycotted the show, because you're the executive producer, Donald Trump,” adding that “the advertisers left, the audience left … I was caught in the middle of this political thing,” but “it gave me an opportunity to shoot back.”

Jones asked which Republicans inspired Schwarzenegger to go into politics, and he responded by praising party leaders like Ronald Reagan but made it very clear: "I'm not a Trump Republican, that's why I didn't vote for him."

The feud between the former governor and the president has been ramping up lately, most recently with Schwarzenegger mocking Trump’s low approval ratings in a Twitter video. Previously, Trump claimed that the Celebrity Apprentice host didn’t voluntarily leave his post, but in fact was fired. The president tweeted last month that "he was fired by his bad (pathetic) ratings, not by me.”

Earlier in the town hall, Schwarzenegger also slammed Trump for threatening to slash funding to public broadcasting and kids’ after-school programs, which he referred to as “balancing the budget on the backs of the kids.”

"We are not going to let anyone take that money away because this is what helps kids,” he told Jones. "He has talked so much about making America great, but taking $1.2 billion away from the kids is not making America great."

Said Schwarzenegger about himself and Trump: “We have been friends for many, many years, for decades as a matter of fact. What ticked him off was the fact that I didn’t vote for him, I came out and said I wouldn’t vote for him and told others not to vote for him.”

A Trump rally organizer from Los Angeles asked the former governor what he thought about violence at her recent pro-Trump events, to which Schwarzenegger decried the destruction of Trump’s Walk of Fame star.

And in the end, Schwarzenegger explained, he wants the president to succeed. “I think that Donald Trump won the presidency and I called him right after he won and I said, 'Congratulations, you’re now our president,'” he said. “I said the same thing also about [Barack] Obama.”