Raise your hand if you’ve ever heard a presidential candidate, let alone the incumbent president, say he cannot commit to accepting the results of a free and fair election if he loses.
OK, I’ll concede that we’ve heard it said once: Donald Trump made the same threat four years ago when he was one of two non-incumbents running for the office.
There he was today, on Fox News Sunday, telling reporter Chris Wallace that he cannot commit to accepting the results if he loses to Joseph R. Biden Jr. this fall.
As I think of that statement, all I hear is the president of the United States saying he doesn’t trust a government system of which he is in charge.
Trump told Wallace that since he didn’t commit to accepting the 2016 results if he lost that his saying the same thing now is no big deal. Actually, it is a big bleeping deal.
Trump has been hurling unfounded and unwarranted allegations of voter fraud for as long as he has been president. He declared that millions of illegal votes were cast for Hillary Clinton in 2016, which provided her with the 3 million popular vote lead over Trump. He is asserting much the same thing this time, with Biden’s team conspiring to collect illegal votes.
Trump alleges that mail-in voting is fraught with corruption, even though the states that conduct such balloting now stand firmly behind the integrity of their electoral systems.
Trump wants to suppress the vote. He doesn’t want to open the system up to every eligible voter. He has said that mail-in voting would make it damn near impossible for Republicans to win the presidency … ever again!
Donald Trump is sowing the seeds of suspicion on a system that works. For the president to in effect condemn that system by refusing to commit to accepting the results is yet another exercise in shameful demagoguery.
Still, I chuckled when I read the response from the Biden campaign. The Biden campaign responded: “The American people will decide this election. And the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.”
You know, that might be worth waiting to see if it occurs.