Trump says he would peacefully transfer power at end of his term if reelected

AP Photo/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez, Pool
Donald Trump sits at the defense table at New York Supreme Court, Thursday, Dec. 7, 2023, in New York. (AP Photo/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez, Pool)

Former President Trump said he would allow for a peaceful transfer of power at the end of his second term if he is reelected.

In a Friday interview with Trump, conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt asked the former president if he would “peacefully surrender” power at the end of another term if he is reelected.

“I did that this time,” Trump said about the 2020 election. “And I’ll tell you what, the election was rigged and we have plenty of evidence of it, but I did it anyway.”

Trump continued, “The other question you should ask is you should ask the other side will you cheat on the elections, because the only way we’re going to lose is if they cheat on the elections.”

Trump and his supporters have falsely maintained that the 2020 election was rigged, leading some of his base to storm the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an attempt to stop the certification of the election results.

In the same interview, the former president tried to distance himself from recent comparisons to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, saying he wasn’t a “student” of him. Trump has been facing the aforementioned comparisons in connection with recent comments in which he has said immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” 

“When you look at it, if you look at what’s coming in, we have from all over the world — not one group — they’re coming in from Asia, from Africa, from South America; they’re coming from all over the world,” Trump said in the interview. “They’re coming from mental institutions and insane asylums. They’re terrorists, absolutely, that’s poisoning our country, that’s poisoning the blood of our country.”

“They have people coming in — we don’t even know what the language is that they speak. We have nobody that speaks the language, and they’re loading up our classes, we’re loading up our classes, our school classes with children that don’t speak the language, that don’t speak our language,” he continued. “And nobody knows what’s going on. No, we are poisoning our country; we’re poisoning the blood of our country.”

Hewitt’s interview wasn’t the only time this week that Trump has tried to distance himself from Hitler, who wrote in “Mein Kampf” that German blood was being poisoned by Jews.

“They’re destroying the blood of our country. That’s what they’re doing. They’re destroying our country. They don’t like it when I said that — and I never read ‘Mein Kampf,’” Trump said at a rally in Iowa on Tuesday.

Tags 2020 election 2024 election 2024 GOP presidential primary 2024 presidential election Adolf Hitler Donald Trump Donald Trump Hugh Hewitt Hugh Hewitt

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