Donald Trump Won't Leave White House 'Voluntarily' If He Loses 2020 Election, Predicts GOP Candidate William Weld

Republican presidential candidate and former Massachusetts Governor William Weld said Friday that he believes President Donald Trump will not willingly cede the Oval Office if he does not win the election in 2020.

Weld, who was the Libertarian Party vice-presidential nominee in 2016 but has returned to his Republican roots in a long-shot bid to challenge Trump for the 2020 nomination, appeared on HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher Friday, where Maher asked the former governor directly, "If Trump loses, do you think he'll leave?"

"Not voluntarily," said Weld. "He'll have a run at saying, 'It was a rigged game so I'm not leaving.' I don't think the military and indeed even the Justice Department — the rank-and-file, the investigative agencies — would stand for that in this country."

Maher laughed at this notion that the existing system of government would prevent the president from refusing to admit defeat: "But we've said that about everything so far! As he becomes more and more a dictator, we go 'That would never happen, they would never stand for that.'"

"It's very obvious that he wants to be what the people who wrote the Constitution were hell-bent to avoid, which is a king," responded Weld. "He loves autocrats and he consorts with them and he says a free press is the enemy of the people... He says 'We just can't have these restrictions on me. I'm not gonna play. If anyone's investigating me, I'm not gonna engage with Congress.' What could be a more obvious violation of his oath of office?"

Trump has made apparently joking comments — as recently as April — about doing away with the current two-term limit on U.S. presidents. When the president received a trophy while speaking at an April 18 event for the Wounded Warrior Project, he told the general who presented the award to him that it would "find a permanent place, at least for six years, in the Oval Office." He then added, “I was going to joke, General, and say at least for 10 or 14 years, but we would cause bedlam if I said that, so we’ll say six."

In March 2018, Trump praised Chinese President Xi Jinping for having done away with term limits in his country.

"He's now president for life. President for life. No, he's great," Trump said at the time. "And look, he was able to do that. I think it's great. Maybe we'll have to give that a shot some day."

However, in November 2018, the president told Fox News' Chris Wallace that he had no intention of trying to remove presidential term limits in the U.S.

"I think the eight-year limit is a good thing, not a bad thing," said Trump.