House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Monday that President Donald Trump, "Whether he knows it yet or not, he will be leaving" the White House, despite Trump's refusal to commit to respecting the 2020 presidential election results.
"There is a process," Pelosi, D-Calif., said on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," referring to presidential elections and the Constitutional mechanism for putting their winners into the White House.
"It has nothing to do with a certain occupant of the White House doesn't feel like moving and has to be fumigated out of there," she said.
Pelosi's comments came a day after the broadcast of a Fox News interview with Trump, during which journalist Chris Wallace asked the Republican president if he would accept the results of the election. Trump would not commit to that.
"I have to see. Look, you — I have to see," Trump said. "No, I'm not going to just say yes. I'm not going to say no."
In the same interview, Trump claimed, without any evidence, that mail-in voting will "rig the election." Trump previously has made that claim in opposing efforts in a number of states to expand mail-in voting to limit the spread of the coronavirus.
Trump told Wallace that Fox's public opinion poll and other polls showing him trailing presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden by a significant margin are "fake."
Pelosi, in her interview Monday, suggested that voters, as well as the Constitution, would lead to Trump departing the office in January, regardless of whether he accepts it in his mind or whether he refuses to physically move out of the White House.
"Whether he knows it yet or not, he will be leaving," Pelosi said.Â
"Just because he might not want to move out of the White House doesn't mean we won't have an inauguration ceremony to inaugurate a duly elected president of the United States."
Pelosi noted that she is "second in line to the presidency" and that last week she had her "regular continuation of government briefing" detailing the process by which she would become president if both the president and vice president were incapacitated or died.
'I say to them [the briefers], 'This is never going to happen.' God willing, it never will. But there is a process," she said.Â
"The presidency is the presidency. It's not geography or location."
Biden last month in an interview said that Trump "is going to try to steal this election."
In the same interview on "The Daily Show with Trevor Noah," Biden said "my single greatest concern" is making sure that the presidential voting process is fair.
And he said that he has considered the possibility that Trump would refuse to physically leave the White House if Biden won.
Biden predicted that military leaders would make sure that Trump leaves.
"I promise you, I'm absolutely convinced they will escort him from the White House with great dispatch," Biden said.
Trump's campaign had called those comments "just another brainless conspiracy theory from Joe Biden as he continues to try to undermine confidence in our elections."