Analysis: Get ready, Trump will never accept the election result

Former President Donald Trump has shown remarkable consistency over many years on a key issue in American politics: he does not trust the election results.

He questions the results when he wins. He refuses to give in when he loses. Now he’s reserving judgment on whether this year’s election will be “honest.”

In each quote below, he answers a version of the same question: “Will you accept the results of a given election?”

In 2016, during the last presidential debate, then-candidate Donald Trump answered the question like this: “I will look at that at the right time. I’m not looking at anything right now. I will look into it at the right time.”

Trump was not the favorite to win the election in 2016, which may have something to do with him laying the groundwork to reject the results in the months before Election Day, when he complained that the system was “rigged.”

In the last presidential debate of 2016, moderator Chris Wallace, then with Fox News and now with CNNhighlighted the principle of a peaceful transfer of power in the country – where the two parties come together after an election to move forward.

When Wallace asked Trump if he would commit to this principle, Trump said, “What I’m saying is I’ll get back to you when the time comes. I’ll keep the suspense. OK?”

Even after his Electoral College victory, and after he became president, Trump refused to say that the 2016 election, which he won, was legitimate, claiming, without evidence, that millions of people voted illegally, which gave him cost the popular vote. The special commission he appointed as chairman to investigate his allegations of voter fraud found no evidence of it.

In July 2020, already president of the United States, Donald Trump told Fox News Sunday: “no. I have to see. Look, I have to see. No, I’m not just going to say ‘yes’. I’m not going to say ‘no’. And I didn’t do that last time either.”

Here, once again, Trump is speaking to Wallace when the anchor was on Fox. And here, again, Trump refuses to say he will accept the election results.

The reason, again, is unsubstantiated allegations of illegal voting, but the details have changed.

In 2020, Trump was complaining about mail-in voting rather than a fanciful conspiracy of millions of people voting illegally. There’s still no evidence of widespread mail-in voter fraud, by the way.

In 2020, as everyone knows, he refused to accept his defeat and encouraged supporters to protest the Electoral College vote count on January 6, 2021. A mob of his supporters, many of whom have since been prosecuted, stormed the Capitol building.

On May 1 of this year, during an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Tump said, “If everything is honest, I will gladly accept the results. If it’s not, you have to fight for the country’s right.”

Unlike 2016 or 2020, when he trailed in polls against Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, respectively, Trump is currently ahead of Biden in some polls. Reportedly citing election law changes pushed by Republican lawmakers in key states, Trump said he now expects the election to be “honest.”

But he is clearly not ready to issue a blanket vote of confidence in the electoral system, and Trump has said he will “make it known” if there is anything wrong with the 2024 election.

“I would be doing the country a disservice if I said otherwise,” Trump said. “But no, I hope for an honest election and we hope to win perhaps [por uma margem] very large.”

Since he likes to refer to the multiple criminal charges as a form of “election interference,” it’s safe to say there is preparation for him to reject the results of the upcoming election.

Majority of Republicans currently do not trust the US election

Trump’s attacks on election integrity, as Marshall Cohen of CNN documented, extended far beyond the three races in which he was a candidate. The attacks coincided with a sharp decline in how his fellow Republicans view the US election.

In 2006, 92 percent of Republicans were very or somewhat confident that votes would be counted and counted accurately, according to Gallup polls. For comparison, 70% of independents and 66% of Democrats had the same confidence in the accuracy of the US election.

By 2022, only 40% of Republicans said they were very or somewhat confident that votes would be counted and counted accurately compared to 85% of Democrats and 67% of independents.

It may be natural for supporters of a party out of power to have some reservations about the electoral system. But the decline in Republican trust since 2018, from 77% to 40% in 2022, is notable.

Democrats are frustrated with results too

None of this is to say that Trump’s rivals are likely to happily accept a victory for the former president. In 2019, years after her loss to Trump, Hillary Clinton said she felt Trump was an “illegitimate president” because of the tactics Republicans used to suppress the vote in 2016, among other things.

But that doesn’t change the fact that, unlike Trump in 2020, she accepted her Electoral College victory in 2016.

“Last night, I congratulated Donald Trump and offered to work with him on behalf of our country. I hope he will be a successful president for all Americans,” Clinton said in her Nov. 9, 2016, concession speech.

“Our constitutional democracy enshrines the peaceful transfer of power and we not only respect that, we value it,” she added at the time.

We can hope that Trump will not make such a concession if he is defeated in November. Instead, he is likely to again allege a conspiracy to take away the election from him, regardless of what voters say.