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.
Mr. Trump also circumvented a question on whether he had been in touch with Mr. Putin since he left the White house in 2021.
“I don’t comment on that, but I will tell you that if I did, it’s a smart thing,” Mr. Trump said, adding that it was a good thing to have relationships.
“If I have a relationship, I don’t talk about it,” he said, later saying that he had a good relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping, Mr. Putin and North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-un.
Questioned about China recently simulating a naval blockade of Taiwan, and whether he, as President, would send troops to defend Taiwan if China invaded it, Mr Trump said, “Look they are doing it [the naval exercise] now, because they are not going to do it afterwards.”
Mr. Trump said that the former head of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) military alliance, Jens Stoltenberg, appreciated the fact that he had pressured NATO members to meet their 2% of GDP defence expenditure commitments.
He spoke at length about how he would slap import tariffs on companies that did not build their products in America.
The former President, who had once referred to India as ‘the Tariff King’ spoke at length about how he would use tariffs if elected.
“To me, the most beautiful word in the dictionary is tariff, and it’s my favourite word.” He suggested he would even implement 2,000% tariffs, citing an example of the car industry.
On trade, he mentioned India, among other countries, as being “ tough”.
“For instance, India is a very tough country. It’s not only China. China is, is the, I would say, probably the toughest,” Mr. Trump said.
“But there are a lot of tough you know, it’s very tough. European Union …They treat us so badly, we have a deficit,” he said.
He proposed using tariffs to fund tax cuts. “You would have a surplus without even going into growth,” he said.
On migration, Mr. Trump said he supported legal migration but continued to largely equate illegal migrants to criminals. He claimed that countries such as Venezuela, were sending prisoners and individuals in “insane asylums” to the U.S. illegally.
“I want a lot of people to come into our country, but I want them to come in legally,” Mr. Trump said, in response to a question on the economic contribution of migrants and the need for workers. He said he wanted employers to have a “choice” but also the legal migrants to have choice.
‘Have to straighten out the press’
“We have to straighten out our press, because we have a corrupt press,” Mr. Trump said. His first presidential term included frequent attacks on the media and pointed confrontations with specific journalists and organisations. Mr. Trump was answering a question on whether Google should be broken up. He said he gave the company credit for becoming powerful and suggested it needed to be made “more fair” without breaking it up.
“They do treat me very badly,” he said.
Mr. Trump confirmed that he would make billionaire entrepreneur and owner of SpaceX and media site X, Elon Musk, in charge of cutting “wasteful expenditure” which would include deregulation. He said he had negotiated down the price of the two Air Force One aircraft as President, citing it as an example of slashing costs. Boeing had said in 2022 that it should not have signed the $3.8 billion deal.
He said the Republican Party was the “common sense” party, again implying, on an unsubstantiated basis, that elections were unfair.
“Forget about conservative, liberal. We are, let’s say, conservative, but we are really a party of… we need borders, we need fair elections, we don’t want men playing in women’s sports. We don’t want transgender operations without parental consent,” he said.
Through the interview, Mr. Trump kept using former U.S. President Barack Obama’s middle name, “Hussein” , which is a Muslim name, a tactic he has used previously in line with the nativist part of his Make America Great Again (MAGA) platform.
Published – October 16, 2024 09:52 pm IST
