Former acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney has said he ‘absolutely’ expects President Trump to run again in 2024 should he lose his current reelection bid.
‘After this election’s over who is the leading Republican candidate for 2024?‘ Mulvaney said. ‘I think now, folks are starting to realize, wait for a second, if Donald Trump loses he might be the guy, and I’m telling you, absolutely.‘
‘I would absolutely expect the president to stay involved in politics and would absolutely put him on the shortlist of people who are likely to run in 2024,‘ Mulvaney said during a webinar hosted by the Dublin think tank Institute for International and European Affairs.
President Trump's former Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney predicts Trump might run in 2024: "He doesn't like losing." pic.twitter.com/hGlAUCaYJr
— The Recount (@therecount) November 5, 2020
Mulvaney, who also served as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget and who now serves as special envoy for Northern Ireland noted that the president would still be younger than Joe Biden is now.
Describing him as a ‘very high-energy 74-year-old’ Mulvaney said that he expects him to be ‘further engaged in 2024 or 2028 if he were to lose this next election.’
He also noted Trump ‘doesn’t like losing’ and also rejected the idea that the president’s decision to file lawsuits in battleground states that were still counting votes was a threat to democracy.
‘It should not surprise anybody that there are lawyers and that there are lawsuits, and it is not a tacit admission of loss, any more than it is a declaration of victory,’ he said.
Earlier in the day, Mulvaney said that should Trump lose, he would ensure a peaceful transition of power should Biden ultimately win.
‘If the process runs, and I expect it to run, and at the end of that process Joe Biden’s the president, you can absolutely guarantee a peaceful transition of power. I just hope the same is true on the other side,’ Mulvaney told CNBC.
‘Could things get really sloppy and messy and slow between now and then? Absolutely. They were, by the way, in 2000 as well, yet we managed to work through it,’ he said, referring to the election between George W. Bush and Al Gore.
‘American elections can be a sloppy, ugly thing but it’s sort of like making a law which we describe as making sausage: No one wants to see it happen but you enjoy the end product,’ he said.
President Trump declared victory early on Wednesday despite million of votes were still being counted across several states.
Trump’s lead in Georgia is narrowing with just over 3,000 votes separating the two candidates.
In North Carolina, he is leading by around 77,000 votes.
Biden holds the lead in both Nevada and Arizona. Just 58,000 votes separate Trump from Biden in Pennsylvania where the gap is narrowing as votes continue to be counted.
