Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy said Sunday that, if he wins the 2024 election, he would ask former President Donald Trump to serve as his advisor and mentor.

“I want to build on the foundation Trump laid,” the former biotech businessman told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd. “I don’t want to re-learn the same lessons. I want to pick up where he left off in taking on the administrative state.”

Ramaswamy, who in the absence of frontrunner Trump attracted the most attacks from his rivals in last week’s first GOP primary debate, suggested Trump had been “duped” by his own White House advisors who warned against firing swathes of federal employees.

“Read the law,” he urged Todd. “Turns out those civil service protections only apply to individual firings, not to mass layoffs. Mass layoffs are absolutely what I will bring to the D.C. bureaucracy.”

Elsewhere in their interview, Todd sparred with Ramaswamy over his contradictory comments about former Vice President Mike Pence’s certification of the 2020 election.

Last week, Ramaswamy faced criticism for comparing Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) to one of the “modern grand wizards of the modern KKK.”

Watch the interview here: