Donald Trump repeatedly said he would STAY in White House and not let Joe Biden in

Former President Donald Trump privately told aides he was ‘never’ going to leave the White House even after his 2020 election defeat, according to a new book.

The reported private comments came after Trump refused to concede on election night and after networks called the race for now-President Joe Biden – and as key administration officials held up a transition to the new administration.

‘We’re never leaving,’ Trump told one aide. ‘How can you leave when you won an election?’ he asked, according to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman’s forthcoming book: Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.

‘I’m just not going to leave,’ he told another aide, in another of his reportedly repeated statements on the subject.

The excerpts from the book, obtained by CNN, do not reveal the precise date Trump reportedly made the comments. 

But according to Haberman, a well-sourced reporter who has followed Trump for decades, Trump appeared to grasp his defeat at some earlier point, in a race where he ended up trailing Biden by 7 million votes in the popular vote and lost the electoral college to Biden 306-232. 

He told aides ‘We did our best’ and  ‘I thought we had it,’ indicating he may have been contemplating a hard-fought loss.

But that changed over time, even amid a string of legal defeats as his allies tried to sue to roll back results in battleground states, only to suffer a series of defeats in court. 

Trump made the comments as legal allies sued to try to get courts to overturn the results in battleground states

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Nov. 10, 2020 there would ‘be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration’

Trump is facing a number of legal probes, including a Justice Department investigation of national security materials seized from Mar-a-Lago

After a period of uncertainty about the transition, workers moved boxes out of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on the White House grounds on January 14, 2021

Trump was ‘overheard’ telling Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel: ‘Why should I leave if they stole it from me?’ 

If the real estate tycoon was making comments about squatting in the White House, it came as other top officials were following Trump’s lead, as senior Republicans in the Capitol were calling for waiting for Trump’s fraud claims to play out in court.

‘There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration,’ former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Nov. 10, 2020 with a smile. 

Trump was publicly undermining the election results days earlier on Election Night 2020.

He called it a ‘fraud’ on the public an an ’embarrassment.’

‘We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this election,’ he said.

The report comes as Trump, who flew to Dulles, Virginia Sunday night, finds himself enmeshed in a series of legal probes.

The House Jan. 6th committee is probing the election overturn effort. The Justice Department is investigating removal of classified material that was uncovered during an FBI raid at Mar-a-Lago last month.

A string of top former Trump aides has testified before a federal grand jury reported to be probing the submission of ‘fake’ electors before Congress met to count the electoral votes.