2020
ELECTIONS
Trump says he'll leave office peacefully if he
loses in November
“Certainly, if I don't win, I don't win,” Trump said
Friday.
By CAITLIN
OPRYSKO
06/12/2020
05:28 PM EDT
President
Donald Trump sought to brush aside fears he might not leave office willingly if
November’s election doesn’t go his way.
“Certainly,
if I don't win, I don't win,” he told Fox News’ Harris Faulkner in an interview
that aired Friday. If he doesn’t win the election, Trump continued, “you go on,
do other things.”
Though the
president has never given any serious indication that he might not leave office
if he were to lose reelection, his comments aired Friday appear to be the first
time he has publicly committed to doing so.
Still, he
told Faulker that if he loses, “I think it would be a very bad thing for our
country.”
Faulkner
posed the query after former Vice President Joe Biden, Trump’s likely
Democratic rival in November, raised the prospect during a TV appearance on
Wednesday.
In an
interview on “The Daily Show,” Biden warned Trump could “try to steal this
election” by attempting to suppress votes, pointing to the president’s fervent
opposition to mail-in voting and his unfounded allegations that widespread
mail-in voting was ripe with fraud.
Host Trevor
Noah then asked the vice president if he’d given any consideration to what
would happen if Trump refused to leave office at the end of his term, to which
Biden replied that he had.
“I was so
damn proud to hear that four chiefs of staff coming out and ripping the skin
off of Trump, and you have so many rank-and-file military personnel saying,
‘Whoa we’re not a military state, this is not who we are,’” Biden told Noah, a
reference to rebukes of Trump for his attempts to militarize the response to
nationwide protests.
“I promise
you, I am absolutely convinced they will escort him from the White House with
great dispatch,” Biden said.
Biden’s
warning comes as recent polling shows the former vice president taking the lead
across national polls five months out from the election.
Trump
regularly trolls his critics on the issue, joking at campaign rallies and on
various occasions about extending his presidency past the constitutional limit
of two terms. In addition to the president’s vocal accusations of widespread
voter fraud and claims of “rigged” American elections, of which there is no
evidence, Trump has sometimes suggested that his supporters might “demand” he
remain in office past his second term.
In 2018,
when China’s ruling Communist Party eliminated that country’s two-term limit
and paved the way for President Xi Jinping to serve indefinitely, audio leaked
of Trump apparently joking at a closed-door fundraiser, “maybe we’ll have to
give that a shot someday.”
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