GOP Arizona Mayor Warns Trump Will Refuse To Leave Office If He Wins Second Term
John Giles, Republican mayor of Mesa in Arizona, warned that he doesn’t believe former President Donald Trump will leave office at the end of his second term if he is re-elected.
Giles appeared on CNN’s Laura Coates Live after he reached across the political aisle to endorse Democratic presumptive nominee Kamala Harris on Monday.
Speaking to host Laura Coates, the Republican warned that despite his previous reservations that the notion of Trump refusing to “leave office” was “hyperbolic” it now “needs to be said” that “this might be the last free and fair election.”
Giles said that the former president’s comments to Christian supporters at Turning Point Action’s Believers’ Summit on Friday that if he wins the presidency in November, they would never need to vote again.
Trump said: “Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine, you won’t have to vote any more, my beautiful Christians. You got to get out and vote. In four years, you don’t have to vote again. We’ll have it fixed so good you’re not going to have to vote.”
Coates played a clip from Trump’s Monday interview with Fox News in which he called the backlash to his comments “ridiculous” and retorted how he left office at the end of his last term.
Asked by the host about whether he thought Trump would, in fact, leave office, Giles replied:
No, I don’t. As I was writing this op-ed that ran in The Arizona Republic this morning I remember at one point I had a phrase in the op-ed where I said: ‘If Donald Trump selected, I fear this might be the last free and fair election of my lifetime’ – and I struck it out because I thought, you know what that’s a little hyperbolic, that’s more than needs to be said.
And then he makes this statement saying that the once time elected and I’m enthroned, we won’t need elections any longer. So sometimes Donald Trump says the quiet part out loud and we have to believe him. And I think this is one of those occasions that we got some real insight into what his priorities are.
Coates added: “There are many who will say that the conversation itself is hyperbolic and then you hear statements that he’s made and you have to wonder, which came first the chicken or the egg in these conversations.
Watch above on CNN.
