Trump has sown doubts in the elections for more than a decade. The debate was the most recent.

It took debate moderator Dana Bash three tries to get it right. donald trump to answer the question: will he accept the result of the 2024 election regardless of who wins?

“If it’s a fair, legal, good election – sure,” he responded, refusing to commit himself openly. He then alluded to a persistent lie he has told his entire career – that American elections are riddled with fraud: “I would have preferred to accept it – but the fraud and everything else was ridiculous.”

It ended up being just a footnote in Thursday night’s debate – coming only later Joe BidenThe president’s halting performance sent Democrats into a panic, and the two men vying for president argued over their handicaps at golf.

But it could be a harbinger of how he will handle this election. His responses Thursday night echo what he said on stage four years ago about accepting the results of the 2020 election — responses that preceded him in trying to overturn an election he lost, culminating in a mob of his supporters storming the Capitol .

These responses follow a consistent pattern for Trump: arguing that when he is losing, the system is rigged against him. It is a persistent attack on public confidence in the country’s democratic foundations by the leader of one of its two dominant political parties. The former president’s message about fraudulent elections is not new. But even his indirect reference on Thursday was presented to a significantly larger audience than a campaign rally before loyal supporters.

Biden has called the 2024 election nothing less than a choice about the future of American democracy.

Not a full day after his rocky performance, Biden took the stage in North Carolina to try to quell the despair sweeping his party. The Biden who mumbled during a 90-minute debate the night before was now shouting in a 15 minute meetingparticularly excited by a moment in Thursday’s debate.

“The most dangerous thing is that we learned that Donald Trump will not respect the results of this year’s elections. He’s still not respecting the last time,” Biden told the crowd.

“Three times, Trump was questioned by the moderators,” he said, raising his voice. “Donald Trump refused to accept the results of 2020. And we all saw what happened on January 6th.

Trump’s refusal to accept the election results began long before 2020 – and it didn’t stop on January 6th.

The 2012 election was a “total farce”which justified a“March on Washington” to “stop this charade.” The 2016 Iowa caucuses were manipulated against him later Ted Cruz won and it should have been remade. The same was true of that year’s general election – which he infamously committed himself to. accept the results of “if I win” – and even after winning, he stated that he also won the popular voteonce you “deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

And, of course, there’s 2020.

“What are you prepared to do to reassure the American people that the next president will be the rightful winner of this election?” moderator Chris Wallace asked the same two men during the September 2020 debate.

Trump, as on Thursday night, was not particularly interested in responding. He immediately claimed that Hillary Clinton and “all different people” had “come after me trying to do a coup” in 2016. He then attacked mail-in ballots – which turned out to be the most common way Americans voted in 2020 “As far as ballots go, it’s a disaster,” he said, spreading conspiracy theories about ballots “flooding” the system.

“If I see tens of thousands of ballots being manipulated, I cannot agree with that,” he said then.

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 persisted. Election administrators — both Democrats and Republicans — in key states said his claims were false and resisted pressure to throw the elections in his favor, and he persisted. His own Justice Department said there was no widespread fraud and he persisted. His vice president refused to accept a last-ditch strategy to keep him in office, and he persisted.

His supporters – after being called to Washington by the president, incited by his overwhelming torrent of lies about the elections – 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 the election. He offered no apology. Instead, it was former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who should.

Political violence is “totally unacceptable,” Trump said when asked about the issue during Thursday’s debate. But the last time was not his fault: “And if you saw my statements that I made on Twitter at the time, and also my statement that I made in the Rose Garden, you would say that it is 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 it loud and clear.