It took debate moderator Dana Bash three tries to get it Donald Trump to answer the question: Will he accept the results of the 2024 election regardless of who wins?
“If it’s a fair, legal and good election – absolutely,” he responded, refusing to commit outright. He then alluded to a persistent lie he has told throughout his career – that the US elections are overrun with fraud: “I would much rather have accepted this – but the fraud and everything else was ridiculous.”
It ended up as a footnote in Thursday night’s debate, and only came after Joe BidenThe faltering performance caused panic among Democrats and the two men running for president began to bicker about their golf handicaps.
But it could foreshadow his approach to this election. His answers Thursday night echo what he said on stage four years ago about accepting the outcome of the 2020 election — answers that ultimately preceded his attempt to overturn an election he lost, culminating in a gang of his supporters who stormed the Capitol.
Those responses follow a consistent pattern for Trump: argue that if he loses, the system will be rigged against him. It’s a sustained assault on public faith in the country’s democratic foundations by the leader of one of the country’s two dominant political parties. The former president’s message about fraudulent elections is not new. But even his oblique reference on Thursday was to a significantly larger audience than a campaign rally for loyal supporters.
Biden sees the 2024 election as nothing less than a choice about the future of American democracy.
Less than a day after his struggling performance, Biden took the stage in North Carolina to try to quell the despair rippling through his party. The Biden who had mumbled through a 90-minute debate performance the night before was now shouting in a 15-minute pep rally fueled in no small part by a moment from Thursday’s debate.
“Most dangerously, we have learned that Donald Trump will not respect this year’s election results. He still doesn’t respect it last time out,” Biden told the crowd.
“Three times Trump was asked by the moderators,” he said, raising his voice. “Donald Trump refused to accept the 2020 results. And we all saw what happened on January 6th. It was a direct result of that.”
Trump’s refusal to accept the election results began long before 2020, and did not end after January 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 did that year’s general election – where he infamously promised to accept the results of ‘if I win’ – and even after he won, he claimed he had also won the popular vote, if you ‘remember the millions of people who deducts illegal voting’.
And of course there’s 2020.
“What are you willing to do to convince 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, as on Thursday evening, was not particularly interested in answers. He immediately claimed that Hillary Clinton and “all different people” had “come after me trying to stage a coup” in 2016. He then attacked mail-in ballots — which ended up being the most common way Americans voted in 2020. As far as ballots are concerned, it’s a disaster,” he said, spreading conspiracy theories about ballots “flooding” the system.
“When I see tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated, I cannot go along with that,” he said at the time.
Trump would lose weeks later and spend the rest of his presidency trying to stay in the White House. Courts across the country rejected his claims of widespread voter fraud, and he kept going. Election administrators—both Democrats and Republicans—in key states said his claims were untrue and resisted pressure to swing the election his way, and he kept going. His own Justice Department said there was no widespread fraud, and he kept going. His vice president refused to concoct a last-minute ploy to keep him in office, and he kept going.
His supporters—after being summoned to Washington by the president, incited by his overwhelming barrage of lies about the election—then stormed the Capitol.
But the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Trump said during 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 have done so.
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 saw my statements that I made on Twitter back then, and my statement that I made in the Rose Garden, you would say it was 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.”
