In the past few days, we’ve seen something of a seismic shift in the rhetoric of former President Donald Trump: He has admitted on three separate occasions to losing the 2020 election. The very same race Trump’s been committed to baselessly claiming for years he actually won.
The latest instance of Trump’s brief encounter with reality came in an interview with podcaster Lex Fridman, who asked a rather anodyne question: “How do you think you’ll do in the debate coming up?”
Trump boasted about his success in debating and recalled “the famous Rosie O’Donnell debate” before pivoting to 2020.
“I became president, and then the second time, I got millions more votes than he got the first time,” he said, starting down a path familiar to anyone who’s paid attention. “I was told that if I got 63 million, which is what I got the first time, you would win. You can’t not win. And I got millions of more votes than that. And I lost by a whisker.”
This wouldn’t be the first time Trump has admitted he lost. Over the years he’s made headlines for apparent slips in which he concedes that he did indeed lose the election to President Joe Biden, admissions that are at odds with his deranged crusade to insist the election was stolen — a crusade that has somehow convinced the majority of Republican voters of this fantasy.
But in the last few weeks, the pace of Trump’s 2020 confessions has accelerated.
Indeed, “I lost by a whisker” was also Trump’s turn of phrase during a Moms for Liberty summit he spoke at on August 30th:
During an August press event at the Southern Border, Trump also admitted that he “didn’t quite make it” in the 2020 election.
Pointing to a chart of how illegal immigration had slowed during his administration, Trump said, “This was the last week in office for me because of a horrible, horrible election where I got many millions more votes than I got the first time, but didn’t quite make it, just a little bit short.”
Now, anyone familiar with the Saturday morning education cartoons of Schoolhouse Rock (or seminal De La Soul songs) knows that three is, in fact, the magic number. And so here we are, just some 1,300 odd days after Trump was formally declared the loser of the 2020 election; Trump appears to be finally coming to grips with it.
There is no shortage of social media posts and headlines proclaiming that Trump has finally accepted that he lost, which seems significant given the firehose of election denial bullshittery for which he’s single-handedly responsible. And it is newsworthy for sure, but is his message really that different? No, not really.
In the Fridman interview, which was published Tuesday, a still aggrieved Trump made very clear that believed that the changes to that came as a result of the Covid pandemic were unfair and the sole reason he lost.
Yes, he admitted that he lost “by a whisker,” but only because of Democratic voting shenanigans, never mind that every single attempt by Republicans to prove those alleged shenanigans in court has failed, in some cases even struck down by judges appointed by Trump.
So what to make of this new approach? Well, a skeptic might see this as evidence that his campaign managers, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, in particular, probably got to him and told him to cool it on the election denialism. And not necessarily because that’s the principled approach to stopping a pernicious tactic that undermines the core democratic institution of this nation, but because it turns off a lot of still persuadable voters.
The fact that Trump is pivoting to being a “loser” can be viewed as a pretty stunning admission that he is trending in the wrong direction and needs to change tactics.
In fact, in their interview Lex Fridman virtually begged the former president to reassure independent voters like himself that he would stop talking about the 2020 election and the violent consequence of his rhetoric. Trump couldn’t help himself (shocker!) and returned to making the same baseless conspiracy theories that turn off the very voters likely to decide the 2024 election.
So its noteworthy that Trump has begun to admit that he lost, in much the same way Fonzie struggled to get self-effacing words out of his mouth on Happy Days. But nothing materially has changed in his position.
The only significant question to emerge is if conservative media — which has dutifully looked the other way, either ignoring Trump’s conspiracy theories or promoting them — will now feel empowered to tell viewers that Trump did lose the 2020 election as he has admitted.
My guess is a powerful no, seeing as they seem far more dedicated to telling their viewers what they want to hear — or “respecting their audience” — than the truth.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
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