Former President Donald J. Trump must be worried.
Trump will face off with Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday night in their first presidential debate, one that may be the most consequential moment in the 2024 campaign.
In an interview last week with podcast host Lex Fridman, Trump acknowledged, for the first time, that he “lost” the 2020 election “by a whisker.”
He lost, he said. Imagine that.
In the interview, Trump said he doesn’t think the upcoming election will be close. Harking back to the 2016 presidential election, he said, “I’ve done well with debates. I became president,” and added, “Then, the second time, I got millions more votes than I got the first time. So I was told if I got 63 million, which is what I got the first time, you would win. You can’t not win.”
Then he dropped it: “And I got millions more votes than that and lost by a whisker.”
He lost?
That admission shows Trump is scared. He should be.
His comment was highly calculated. Some desperate campaign adviser must finally be getting through to him. Voters are turning away from him. Trump realizes, ahead of the big debate, that it’s time to defuse the “stolen election” claim; it’s time to deny the lies.
For the last four years, Trump has claimed, incessantly, that he beat Democrat Joe Biden in 2020.
For the last four years, he has mounted the grandest of conspiracies that the election was stolen from him.
Even before the voting concluded in that election, Trump and his misguided minions were furiously plotting to overturn the election results in multiple states.
Trump has since been indicted in connection with attempts to overturn the 2020 election, including pushing wacky plots to recruit slates of fake electors in battleground states that were won by Biden, to falsely claim that Trump had, in fact, won them, authorities say.
According to the federal indictment, Trump knew his claims were false but “repeated and widely disseminated them anyway — to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, to create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and to erode public faith in the administration of the election.” That all inspired the Jan. 6 insurrection, when his supporters attempted a violent takeover of the Capitol.
Trump’s claims that the Democrats engaged in massive voting fraud to help elect Biden have been rejected by a slew of judges, state election officials, his Homeland Security Department and his own attorney general. In 2020, then-Attorney General William Barr told The Associated Press that no such fraud had been found. “To date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election,” he said at the time.
Trump’s insistence that the election was stolen fomented the unprecedented Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. People died in connection with that debacle.
Trump and his legal team have denied the charges in the election interference case and are leaning on a recent Supreme Court ruling that a president enjoys immunity from prosecution for his presidential acts. The election interference case is pending and likely won’t be tried before the Nov. 5 election.
Meanwhile, after lying through his teeth for years, now he acknowledges that yes, he lost.
Why is he finally admitting it now? Because he’s got a gnarly row to hoe ahead. Tuesday, he will be asked why he spent years furiously pushing the canard of election thievery.
At the ABC debate, the moderators will certainly ask him to explain why, despite an avalanche of evidence to the contrary, Trump, in an ignominious effort to subvert our democracy, rallied his base to a revolt based on a colossal lie.
If the moderators don’t inquire, his opponent Harris, a seasoned debater and prosecutor, surely will.
When they do, he will employ a classic Trumpian dodge by saying yes, he knew it all along. He lost, by “just a whisker.”
It won’t be enough. Trump is facing an opponent who has been picking up momentum since she entered the race on July 21. Harris is still riding the wave of a wildly successful Democratic National Convention. Her presidential campaign is a fundraising-records juggernaut — it reportedly raised $361 million in August alone — more than double what Trump has pulled in.
One thing is for sure. Now that Trump has fessed up, his sycophantic supporters just say he never claimed he lost, anyway. It’s just “fake news”?
Laura Washington is a political commentator and longtime Chicago journalist. Her columns appear in the Tribune each Monday. Write to her at LauraLauraWashington@gmail.com.
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