Former President Trump indicated on Saturday that he is standing firm on his 2024 president campaign, despite facing a second indictment this week over his handling of classified materials.
“I will never yield,” the former president said at the North Carolina GOP convention. “I will never be deterred.”
“On Nov. 5, 2024, we’re going to stand up to the corrupt political establishment,” he said earlier in the day during remarks at the Georgia GOP convention. “We’re going to evict a totally corrupt president, Joe Biden, from the White House. And we’re going to finish the job that we started.”
Trump was charged with 37 counts over his alleged mishandling of classified materials and efforts to prevent the federal government from retrieving them, according to the indictment unsealed on Friday.
Despite the legal setback, he remained defiant in his first public appearances since Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith outlined the charges in the indictment. Trump told Politico on a flight between events on Saturday that he would remain in the race, even if he is convicted.
“I’ll never leave,” he said. “Look, if I would have left, I would have left prior to the original race in 2016.”
“That was a rough one. In theory that was not doable,” he added.
However, the former president also acknowledged that he wasn’t pleased with the charges.
“Nobody wants to be indicted,” Trump told Politico. “I don’t care that my poll numbers went up by a lot. I don’t want to be indicted. I’ve never been indicted.”
“I went through my whole life, now I get indicted every two months,” he continued. “It’s been political.”
Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in April related to a 2016 hush money payment. His former lawyer Michael Cohen paid adult film star Stormy Daniels $130,000 ahead of the 2016 election to dissuade her from discussing an alleged affair with Trump.