Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a news conference before a scheduled campaign rally Nov. 18, 2015, in Worcester, Mass. (Steven Senne, AP)
Donald Trump still considers a run as an independent in the general election an option if things don’t work out with the Republicans.
The billionaire GOP front-runner told CNN’s Don Lemon Wednesday night that he would consider running as a third-party candidate, if “they don’t treat me with a certain amount of decorum and respect.”
“If they don’t treat me as the front-runner — by far the front-runner — if the playing field is not level, then certainly all options are open,” Trump said. “But that’s nothing I want to do.”
The former reality-television star implied it might just come down to whether or not he gets the nomination.
“We’ll go through the primaries, we’ll see what happens and I’ll make a determination,” he said.
Trump cited a recent USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll that he would keep 68% of his supporters in a third-party run.
He also tweeted about the poll on Tuesday.
Although Trump says he would win as a third-party candidate, and although he feels the Republican “establishment is not exactly being very good” to him, he says none of that matters because he is certain he will secure the nomination.
“I’m leading in every poll by a lot,” Trump said. “It looks I’m going to win. My whole life has been about winning. I’m not like so many other of the people that you talk to that are essentially losers.”
Trump also told Lemon, “I am the least racist person that you have ever met,” and he confidently predicted that will win both the Hispanic and African-American vote.
As for his call to keep Muslims from entering the U.S., Trump said it did not apply to U.S. citizens, and he said it was “just a break til our politicians, who are grossly incompetent by the way, can get their act together.”
He added that what he is proposing is only one-tenth as bad as what former president Franklin Roosevelt did when he forced Japanese-Americans into internment camps.
Trump said the liberals’ “all-time hero,” Roosevelt, “can do it and nobody says anything. And what he did was ten-times worse than anything I’m talking about.”
Drastic measures are required, Trump explained, because “there’s something out there that is evil.”
“We can’t allow radical killers into this country,” he said. “We can’t do it. We have enough problems.”
“We can’t be politically correct, stupid people,” Trump said. “We have a president, I think he’s a stupid person. Because there’s no way that a normal president could make the speech that he made the other night.”
