President Trump’s national security adviser Robert O’Brien said the president will commit to a peaceful transfer of power, despite speculation that Trump may refuse to leave office if he loses the Nov. 3 election.
“If he loses, of course, he will,” O’Brien told Politico. “If he loses the election, I’m certain the president will transfer power over, but we’ve got to make sure there’s no fraud in the election, and we need to make sure it’s a free and fair election, just like we demand of other countries overseas, we need to make the demand of ourselves.”
Concerns that Trump would refuse to leave office if he loses the election came after the president initially refused to say whether he would accept a peaceful transfer power as national and state polls showed his rival, Democratic nominee Joe Biden, leading in support.
During a recent NBC town hall hosted by Today’s Savannah Guthrie, Trump vowed a peaceful transfer but attacked rhetoric around the speculation, adding a repeated claim that Obama administration officials had spied on his 2016 campaign.
“They spied heavily on my campaign, and they tried to take down a duly elected sitting president, and then, they talk about ‘will you accept a peaceful transfer?’ And the answer is, yes, I will, but I want it to be an honest election, and so does everybody else,” Trump said. “When I see thousands of ballots dumped in a garbage can, and they happen to have my name on it, I’m not happy about it.”
Trump has long sowed doubt about the possibility of a fair election this year, with the coronavirus pandemic prompting record-high levels of mail-in voting.
In a recent interview, Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton claimed that he believes the president wouldn’t leave office in a calm matter if Biden were to win the presidency next month.
“Let’s be clear: Trump will not leave graciously if he loses,” Bolton told CNN’s Jake Tapper earlier this week.
Bolton served in the administration from April 2018 to September 2019, but his relationship with the president soured after he wrote a scathing tell-all book about the Trump White House. He has since become an outspoken critic of his former boss.
