Donald Trump avoids committing to peaceful acceptance of election results

2024 U.S. Presidential polls: Donald Trump continues to sidestep the question whether he would peacefully accept the results on the November 5 election

With under three weeks to go for the general election, former U.S. President Donald Trump, on Tuesday (October 15, 2024), sidestepped the question of whether he would peacefully accept the results. In an interview with Bloomberg’s John Micklethwait at the Economic Club of Chicago — in which he largely commandeered the topics — Mr. Trump declined to say if he had been in contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin since he left the Oval Office. The former President said India was tough in terms of international trade. He also said the U.S. press needed to be “straightened out”, emphasised import tariffs as his economic policy of choice and said he would welcome legal immigrants.

“Well, you had a peaceful transfer of power,” Mr. Trump said, when asked, in the context of the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, if he would encourage a peaceful transfer of power after the November 5 election.

When pressed by Mr. Micklethwait, who said the transfer was the peaceful “compared to Venezuela”, Mr. Trump said he had considered whether or not to sit for the Bloomberg interview because he thought Mr. Micklethwait had been a critic of his.

“We had a term ‘peacefully and patriotically’,” Mr. Trump said, referring to a phrase he used when telling his supporters to march to the U.S. Capitol.

However, in 2021, Mr. Trump had also told his supporters to “fight like hell” in the same speech minutes before the riots. A court filing by special counsel Jack Smith from earlier in October contained more damning evidence that Mr. Trump was aware that he was making false claims about the result of the last elections and that, during the January 6 riots, he did not care for the safety of then Vice-President Mike Pence.

Mr. Trump called into question the result of the 2020 Election during Tuesday’s (October 15, 2024) interview.

“You think the last election was honest?”, he said, brushing off the suggestion that his numerous legal challenges to the results were unsuccessful. He also pointed out that people had protested the 2016 elections in which Democratic Candidate Hilary Clinton won the popular vote but lost the Electoral College vote and presidency to Mr. Trump.