Former President Donald Trump has restated that his comments about being a dictator on his first day back in the White House were only made “in jest.”
The former president argued on Sunday that people were mistaking him for saying he would be a dictator “from Day One” when he had actually said he would only be a dictator “for one day.” Trump, who made the dictator comments in a town hall interview in December, also said that he would resume drilling for gasoline and would close the border.
“Now that was said in jest, and most people, I’m surprised you asked that question,” Trump said in an interview on Fox News’s Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo. “What I’m saying is that we’re going to immediately drill, baby, drill. We’re going to get energy down, and the other thing is we’re going to have a strong border. We’re going to close up the border.”
Trump added that his plans to close the border stem from his belief that a country could not sustain itself when “people from mental institutions and insane asylums” are entering the country, claiming that the United States is “being destroyed.”
The former president was also asked if he should become president again, would he plan to issue more executive orders, a concern for some of his critics. Trump argued that there is “nothing wrong” with executive orders,” claiming that President Joe Biden is “using them all the time.”
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The Biden administration has expressed heavy criticism of Trump’s comments about being a dictator, with White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates calling his comments “wrong.” Over the weekend, Vice President Kamala Harris attended a “Get Out The Vote” rally at South Carolina State University, during which she told those in attendance to “believe” Trump’s dictator comments.
Harris’s speech at the South Carolina rally was made on the same weekend Biden won the Democratic Party’s state primary for the 2024 election, getting 96% of the votes cast. In his victory speech, Biden thanked voters for setting him “on the path to winning the presidency again — and making Donald Trump a loser — again.”
