Trump won’t give up power if he loses marginally: Pelosi

WASHINGTON: Speaker Nancy Pelosi does not believe President Donald Trump can be removed through impeachment - the only way to do it, she said this week, is to defeat him in 2020 by a margin so "big" he cannot challenge the legitimacy of a Democratic victory.
"We have to inoculate against that, we have to be prepared for that," Pelosi said during an interview on Wednesday as she discussed her concern that Trump would not give up power voluntarily if he lost re-election by a slim margin next year.
Pelosi - the de facto head of the Democratic Party until a presidential nominee is selected in 2020 - offered Democrats her "coldblooded" plan for ridding themselves of Trump: Do not get dragged into a protracted impeachment bid that will get crushed in the Republican-controlled Senate, and do not risk alienating the moderate voters who flocked to the party in 2018 by drifting too far to the left. "Own the center left, own the mainstream," Pelosi, 79, said.
Nearly five months into her second speakership, Pelosi appears to be embracing her role as the only Democrat with the power to oppose Trump. While she seems comfortable in waging battle with him, her unease about the president's behaviour has only intensified since the Democrats' triumphal election.
Few people outside Pelosi's inner circle were aware of how worried she was that Trump would try to stop the opposition party from taking control of the House unless the Democrats' victory was emphatic enough to be indisputable. "If we win by four seats, by a thousand votes each, he's not going to respect the election," said Pelosi, recalling her thinking in the run-up to the 2018 elections.
"He would poison the public mind. He would challenge each of the races; he would say you can't seat these people," she added.
In recent weeks Pelosi has told associates that she does not automatically trust the president to respect the results of any election short of an overwhelming defeat. That view, fed by Trump's repeated and unsubstantiated claims of Democratic voter fraud, is one of the reasons she says it is imperative not to play into the president's hands, especially on impeachment.