Former chief of staff Mulvaney: If Trump loses, he’ll ‘absolutely’ run again

WASHINGTON, D.C. (WKBT) — President Donald Trump “absolutely” would run for president if he loses this election to former Vice President Joe Biden, according to one of Trump’s former chiefs of staff.
“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,” Mike Mulvaney said during a webinar Thursday hosted by the Institute for International and European Affairs, a think tank in Dublin, Ireland.
Trump doesn’t like to lose, and he would be younger than Biden is now if he decided to run in 2024, The Irish Times quoted Mulvaney as saying.
Trump is a “very high-energy 74-year-old” who will be “further engaged in 2024 or 2028 if he were to lose this next election,” said Mulvaney, a former Republican congressman who now is Trump’s special envoy to Ireland.
Mulvaney rebuffed suggestions that Trump’s lawsuits against several states over voting threaten the democratic process.
Lawsuits are natural after elections, he said, adding, “Everyone is lawyering up,” including Biden.
“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,” Mulvaney said during the webinar.
He rejected as “crazy” a suggestion that Trump was “mounting a coup” when he claimed that he believed he won in a speech early Wednesday.
Mulvaney, who was Trump’s acting chief of staff from Jan, 2, 2019 until March 31, 2020, also maintained that there will be “a peaceful transition or retention of power” on inauguration day Jan. 20.
“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 contested George W. Bush-Al Gore election in which a U.S. Supreme Court decision on Dec. 12, 2000 settled a recount imbroglio.
“American elections can be a sloppy, ugly thing, but it’s sort of like making law which we describe as making sausage: No one wants to see it happen but you enjoy the end product,” Mulvaney said.

wkbt