Trump says for the first time Biden won but insists he’s not conceding
“He won because the Election was Rigged,” Trump said in one Sunday morning tweet. In another, he stood by his false belief he may be able to win the election and refused to concede, writing, “I concede NOTHING! We have a long way to go.”
Trump also continued to blame his loss on debunked theories about the 2020 election in a series of posts flagged by Twitter for their disputed information.
The tweets from Trump followed a Saturday spent golfing and tweeting similar false conspiracy theories, and driving by a crowd of his supporters who gathered in Washington, DC, to protest the election results on the basis of his lies and propaganda.
Since Biden declared victory last week, the President has spent little time in front of cameras and essentially no time answering questions from reporters he doesn’t perceive as allies. But on Twitter this weekend, the President launched baseless conspiracy theories and false statements to his nearly 90 million followers online.
Trump’s former national security adviser, John Bolton, said Sunday that he thinks the President is “stunned” by his loss.
“I think he’s stunned by it. I think that’s why he’s been silent really for so long. He’s lived in his own dream world and been successful at it these last four years,” Bolton told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria. “The coronavirus was one tragic reality that he couldn’t deal with. His own election loss is, in his mind, another tragic reality now. So I think he’s now trying to calibrate, if in fact I’ve lost, how do I maximize my brand in the days after the coming inauguration of Joe Biden? And I think that’s what’s at stake now.”
“I accept it as a further confirmation of the reality that Joe Biden won the election — and not through any of the rest of that tweet, not through fraud or anything else the President is baselessly alleging. He won because he got more votes, OK, that’s why he won,” Klain said during an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “He got more votes in the popular vote by a lot, and he won the same number of electoral votes that President Trump himself called a landslide four years ago. But look, if the President is prepared to begin to recognize that reality, that’s positive. Donald Trump’s Twitter feed doesn’t make Joe Biden president or not president. The American people did that.”
However, Sanders told Tapper that it’s “beyond belief” that the President “continues to deny reality.”
“Trump will have the distinction of doing more than any person in the history of this country in undermining American democracy,” Sanders added. “The idea that he continues to tell his supporters that the only reason he may have lost this election is because of fraud is an absolutely disgraceful, un-American thing to do.”
And Ohio Republican Governor Mike DeWine told Tapper on the same program that though the President “has every right to go into court,” the Trump administration should begin the formal transition process for Biden’s succession.
“It’s clear, that certainly based on what we know now, that Joe Biden is the President-elect and that transition, for the country’s sake, it’s important for a normal transition to start through,” DeWine said. “And the President could go on his other track, his legal track. We should respect that, but we also need to begin that process.”
This story has been updated with additional developments Sunday.
