Former President and GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump appeared to concede that he lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden during a South Carolina Town Hall broadcast on Fox News.
It was a rare admission for Trump, who has generally maintained that he won the 2020 election, repeatedly calling the official election results wrong and “rigged.”
Talking with Fox’s Laura Ingraham and addressing the recent $350M+ business fraud ruling against him, Trump ends a harangue about what he alleges is persecution and election interference by the Biden White House by telling Laura Ingraham: “They’re trying to damage me so they can win another election.”
Trump: We will have a lot of cash, that doesn’t mean he can take it. I mean, do you know what he did? I think he looked at my cash and said well we will take all of his cash. pic.twitter.com/W6uvaQQ0Z9
— Acyn (@Acyn) February 21, 2024
More than 50 court decisions finding no significant election fraud have not affected Trump’s uwavering rhetoric claiming victory. Nor were his “rigged election” claims deflated by the findings of his own Attorney General William Barr, whose DOJ determined that the election — and Trump’s loss — was legitimate.
Despite these outcomes, Trump still — as he demonstrated at an Iowa campaign appearance last summer — insists the election was not fair. The former president continues to sell the narrative that a fair election would have produced a different result. Some polls show almost 70% of Republicans believe him.
After telling a credulous crowd at a crowded Iowa restaurant that the 2020 election was “rigged”, Trump was asked at an Iowa fair how he would respond to a judge’s protective order relating to the federal election interference case he faced. Trump responded: “The whole thing is a fake — it was put out by Biden, because they can’t win an election the fair way.”
[NOTE: Seven months after the 2020 election, in a 2021 radio interview with Sean Hannity, Trump said “shockingly, we were supposed to win easily at 64 million votes, and we got 75 million votes, and we didn’t win.” But that statement was an anomaly — Trump has since reverted to claiming he won and was unfairly displaced by a corrupt system.]