Trump vows a peaceful transfer of power if reelected

If reelected president in 2024, Donald Trump vowed Friday that he would turn over power peacefully to the next president after him.

In a wide-ranging interview on Friday with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Trump said he would peacefully transfer power to the next president if reelected, despite insisting in the same interview that he peacefully turned over power to President Joe Biden after the 2020 election.

Trump has been indicted for his role in trying to overturn the results of that contest, and he repeated his false claims on Friday that the last election was rigged.

“Of course,” Trump responded to Hewitt when asked if he would hand over power peacefully if reelected. “And I did that this time. And I’ll tell you what. The election was rigged, and we have plenty of evidence of it. But I did it anyway.”

Trump on Friday also said that if the 2024 presidential race was close, and there was one other Republican candidate left after the New Hampshire primary, he would debate them.

On the campaign trail this year, Trump has faced backlash for echoing dictators such as Adolf Hitler, most recently saying that immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.”

But Trump maintained Friday that he’s not a student of Hitler, and he’s never read “Mein Kampf,” the manifesto written by Hitler.

“First of all, I know nothing about Hitler,” Trump said Friday. “I’m not a student of Hitler. I never read his works. They say that he said something about blood. He didn’t say it the way I said it, either, by the way, It’s a very different kind of a statement.”