President Donald Trump refused to commit to accepting the results of the 2020 election if he loses, in an interview on Sunday morning, The Associated Press reported.
Speaking to Fox News Sunday moderator Chris Wallace, Trump seemed to dodge the question of whether or not he’ll concede if the voters appear to choose Joe Biden over him.
“I have to see. Look… I have to see. No, I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say no, and I didn’t last time either,” he said.
By “last time,” he was referring to similar statements he’d made during the 2016 election, when he broadly hinted that he wouldn’t accept the results of the election if he lost. At one point during that campaign, when asked directly about it, he responded that he would “keep you in suspense.”
Similarly, as CNN reported at the time, in October of 2016, he promised to honor the election results “if I win.”
In fact, the notion that Trump may not accept the results of the 2020 election if he loses has come up before in this election cycle. As recently as June, his challenger, Joe Biden, predicted that Trump could refuse to accept a loss in the election.
As The Guardian reported at the time, Biden predicted that Trump could steadfastly refuse to vacate the White House, and that the military would be required to “escort him from the White House with great dispatch.”
By some measures, Trump appears to be laying the groundwork for a claim that the election will have turned out to be fraudulent if he loses. He has steadfastly opposed the expansion of voting by mail, and has claimed repeatedly that Democrats will use that process to “rig” the election. It’s a claim he repeated again during his Sunday interview.
Meanwhile, polls seem to indicate that Trump may lose the election. As previously reported by The Inquisitr , he is trailing Biden by as much as 15 percent in some national polls. Further, Biden has opened up leads in so-called “battleground states,” raising the possibility that the electoral vote will tip in his favor in November.
Trump brushed off those polling results.
“First of all, I’m not losing, because those are fake polls. They were fake in 2016 and now they’re even more fake. The polls were much worse in 2016,” he said.
Polls in 2016 did have Hillary Clinton leading, but never by 15 points. Further, Clinton won the popular vote, although Trump won the electoral vote.