The mainstream media is once again in a flutter that Donald Trump won’t unconditionally vow to accept the result of the 2020 election, even as his vanquished 2016 opponent continues to call him an “illegitimate” president.
“I have to see. Look...I have to see,” Trump told Chris Wallace in a Fox News interview aired Sunday morning. “No, I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say no, and I didn’t last time, either.”
Trump’s comments stirred a troubled reaction by the Associated Press, which reported that the president was going back to his “insurgent playbook of four years ago,” when he made a similar comment in the final debate before the 2016 election. His answer also seemed to corroborate months of media speculation that Trump might refuse to accept defeat to Democrat challenger Joe Biden.
“It is remarkable that a sitting president would express less than complete confidence in the American democracy’s electoral process,” the AP said.
The mainstream media have apparently not found it remarkable that nearly four years on from the last presidential election, Trump’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, still hasn’t acknowledged the result as valid. Although she officially conceded her loss on election night, she has said repeatedly that the presidency was stolen from her.
She even wrote a book in 2017, titled “What Happened,” giving a litany of reasons for the injustice, ranging from interference by Russian President Vladimir Putin to FBI director James Comey’s statement on a probe of Clinton’s handling of classified material, to the mainstream media’s failure to treat her fairly. She even faulted President Barack Obama for not giving a televised speech in 2016 to warn that America’s democracy was under attack. In a 2019 CBS News interview, Clinton said Trump “knows he’s an illegitimate president” and that her defeat was like “losing to a corrupt human tornado.”
Clinton is not alone in her disparaging of the 2016 election process. Democrat lawmakers such as US Representative Adam Schiff have said there is ample evidence that Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia to win the race – an assertion that finally ran out of legs in April 2019, when the Mueller Report was released and said there was insufficient evidence to indicate that anyone associated with the president conspired with Moscow.
And who can forget the thousands of demonstrators who marched in the streets of Los Angeles, New York and other cities in late 2016 and early 2017 to declare that Trump is “not my president”? Protesters even declared a “Not My Presidents Day” on February 20, 2017, when demonstrations were held simultaneously in dozens of US cities.
Democrats might have feared such scenes involving Trump supporters as polls showed Clinton apparently coasting to victory just before the 2016 vote. Chris Wallace, ironically, was the moderator in the final Trump-Clinton debate that October and pressed the billionaire businessman on whether he would “absolutely accept” the election’s result. “I will look at it at the time,” Trump replied, before explaining his concerns about potential election fraud. “I will keep you in suspense,” he added.
Clinton then called Trump’s answer “horrifying” and said, “That is not the way our democracy works.” She subsequently campaigned on the issue, saying in speeches leading up to the election that Trump was “threatening our democracy.” In at least one speech, she said Trump “did something no other presidential nominee has ever done.”
Even if Trump were to reject the outcome, challenging an election’s result would’ve been hardly unprecedented. Democrat Al Gore retracted his concession call to George W. Bush the night of the 2000 election and later went to court to force a recount of the vote in Florida. A Supreme Court ruling on December 12 effectively declared Bush the winner, more than a month after the election, and Gore finally gave his concession speech the next day.
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