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It took three tries from debate moderator Dana Bash to get Donald Trump to answer the question: Will he accept the results of the 2024 election, regardless of who wins?
“If it’s a fair and legal and good election — absolutely,” he responded, refusing to commit outright. He then alluded to a persistent lie he has told his whole career — that American elections are overrun with fraud: “I would have much rather accepted these — but the fraud and everything else was ridiculous.”
It landed as just a footnote in Thursday night’s debate — coming only after Joe Biden’s halting performance panicked Democrats and the two men vying to be president bickered about their golf handicaps.
But it may provide a foreshadowing of his handling of this election. His answers Thursday night echo what he said on stage four years ago about accepting the results of the 2020 election — answers that ultimately preceded him trying to overturn an election that he lost, culminating in a mob of his supporters storming the Capitol.
Those answers follow a consistent pattern for Trump: Argue that when he’s losing, the system is rigged against him. It is a persistent attack on the public trust in the country’s democratic underpinnings from the leader of one of its two dominant political parties. The former president’s message of a fraudulent election is not new. But even his oblique reference on Thursday was in front of a significantly larger audience than a campaign rally in front of loyal supporters.
Biden has cast the 2024 election as no less than a choice about the future of American democracy.
Not a full day after his struggling performance, Biden took the stage in North Carolina to try to quell the despair sweeping across his party. The Biden who mumbled through a 90-minute debate performance the night before was now shouting in a 15-minute pep rally, animated in particular by one moment from Thursday’s debate.
“Most dangerously, we learned that Donald Trump will not respect this year’s election outcome. He’s still not respecting the last time out,” Biden told the crowd.
“Three times, Trump was asked by the moderators,” he said, his voice rising. “Donald Trump refused to accept the results of 2020. And we all saw what happened on Jan. 6. It was a direct consequence of that.”
Trump’s refusal to accept election results began long before 2020 — and did not stop on Jan. 6.
The 2012 election was a “total sham” that warranted a “march on Washington” to “stop this travesty.” The 2016 Iowa caucuses were rigged against him after Ted Cruz won and should have been redone. So too was that year’s general election — which he infamously pledged to accept the results of “if I win” — and even after winning, he claimed he also won the popular vote, once you “deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”
And of course, there is 2020.
“What are you prepared to do to reassure the American people that the next president will be the legitimate winner of this election?” moderator Chris Wallace asked the same two men during the September 2020 debate.
Trump, like on Thursday night, was not particularly interested in answering. He immediately claimed that Hillary Clinton and “all of the different people” had “came after me trying to do a coup” in 2016. Then he attacked mail-in ballots — which wound up being the most common way Americans voted in 2020. “As far as the ballots are concerned, it’s a disaster,” he said, spreading conspiracy theories about ballots “swamping” the system.
“If I see tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated, I can’t go along with that,” he said then.
Trump would lose weeks later and spend the remainder of his presidency trying to remain in the White House. Courts across the country rejected his claims of widespread voter fraud, and he persisted. Election administrators — both Democrats and Republicans — in key states said that his claims were untrue and resisted pressure to throw the election his way, and he persisted. His own Justice Department said there was no widespread fraud, and he persisted. His vice president refused to entertain a last-minute ploy to keep him in office, and he persisted.
His supporters — after being called to Washington by the president, whipped up by his overwhelming torrent of lies about the election — then stormed the Capitol.
But the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Trump said at Thursday’s debate, was not his fault after years of attacking elections. He offered no apology. Instead, it was former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who should.
Political violence is “totally unacceptable,” Trump said when asked about it during Thursday’s debate. But the last time wasn’t his fault: “And if you would see my statements that I made on Twitter at the time, and also my statement that I made in the Rose Garden, you would say it’s one of the strongest statements you’ve ever seen,” he said.
“And as Nancy Pelosi said,” he added, “it was her responsibility, not mine. She said that loud and clear.”
