Geraldo Rivera: ‘I wish I had bailed on the Trump train a lot sooner’

Television personality Geraldo Rivera said Tuesday that he wishes he “had bailed on the Trump train a lot sooner.”

“In retrospect, I wish I had bailed on the Trump train a lot sooner before he threatened the Constitution of the United States with its utter destruction,” Rivera told MSNBC’s Ari Melber on “The Beat.”

Rivera, once well-known as a Trump ally, said earlier this month that he is backing Vice President Harris over Trump in the 2024 election, calling the former president “a sore loser who cannot be trusted to honor the Constitution” in a post on social platform X.

“That is why I am voting for Kamala Harris to be our 47th President,” Rivera said in the post.

Rivera said Tuesday he is “disappointed” in his previous “blindness” toward Trump, “because when push came to shove, he was revealed by his own action to be exactly the person that his critics were saying that he was.”

Rivera, who formerly worked for Fox News, also said in his post announcing his backing of Harris that he had not spoken to Trump since November 2020, only a few days after he lost to President Biden in that year’s election.

“He was calling to get my take on the controversies surrounding the election, which appeared to have been decided by a handful of votes in several states,” Rivera said. “I asked him what he would do if the vote count remained against him. As I reported on Fox News that same morning, Friday the 13th, he told me he was a reasonable man and would do the right thing if that time came.”

He said Trump chose to do the opposite, embarking on “an increasingly menacing campaign to discredit the 2020 election.”

Other figures who have previously backed Trump and who are now supporting Harris’s bid for the presidency include former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Trump-era White House officials Sarah Matthews and Olivia Troye.

“Who’s Geraldo?” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in an email to The Hill on Wednesday.

Updated at 4:44 p.m. EDT