House Speaker Mike Johnson with Trump at the RNC in Milwaukee, July 17, 2024Matt Rourke/AP
Republican leaders backing Donald Trump keep declining to say clearly that they will accept the results of the November election, regardless of who wins.
The latest to sow doubts about the outcome is House Speaker Mike Johnson, who appeared on Sunday on ABC’s This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Stephanopoulos posed a question that he noted Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance, refused to answer in the vice presidential debate against Gov. Tim Walz: “Can you say unequivocally that Joe Biden won the 2020 election and Donald Trump lost?”
Johnson declined to answer the question and instead lambasted it as a “gotcha game.”
“You want us to litigate things that happened four years ago when we’re talking about the future,” he said. “We’re not going to talk about what happened in 2020, we’re going to talk about 2024 and how we’re going to solve the problems with the American people.”
When Stephanopolous played some of Trump’s recent comments back to Johnson and asked if he, like Trump, believes that “the only way that Donald Trump loses is that the Democrats cheat,” Johnson’s non-answer spoke volumes: “Donald Trump’s going to win,” he said. (Trump still refuses to acknowledge his loss clearly and has alleged Democrats “cheat like hell”; his campaign filed more than 60 lawsuits contesting the 2020 election results, all of which were dismissed as having no merit.)
At other points in the interview, Johnson’s tortured responses almost seemed to acknowledge reality. At one point, for example, he said, “Joe Biden has been the president for almost four years. Everybody needs to get over this and move forward.” But he would not say openly and clearly that Donald Trump lost in 2020. (The fact that Johnson mentioned Trump’s “massive” crowds three times in the interview seemed to suggest that he believed the former president was watching, or would otherwise see the interview.)
Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump, the former president’s daughter-in-law, pulled a similar stunt Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union.
“Is there any circumstance in which Donald Trump would accept a defeat and concede?” asked CNN host Dana Bash.
“Of course,” Lara Trump replied, emphasizing vibes over actual votes counted: “If he feels that this is a free, fair and transparent election—which, by the way is my number one goal at the RNC.”
She went on to lament Americans’ supposed “lost faith” in the electoral system—the very one she and other Trump acolytes have continued to undermine. “There were a lot of people after 2020 all across this country who felt like maybe they couldn’t trust that system,” she said. (That may have had something to do with her father-in-law and his GOP allies methodically inciting an insurrection.)
“There was no evidence of widespread fraud” in 2020, Bash reminded viewers.
As Donald Trump and his top allies continue to sow false doubts about US elections, the former president said recently that, whether he wins or loses, this will be his last campaign. But as President Joe Biden just suggested, Trump’s messaging could mean that this one may also not end peacefully.
