President Trump wouldn’t say in an interview on Sunday whether he plans to accept the results of the coming presidential election.
In an interview with Fox News anchor Chris Wallace on early Sunday, Trump said he’ll “have to see” about accepting the results of the election when pressed about the matter, while also asserting without offering any evidence that he thinks mail-in voting “will rig” the November contest.
“I’m not a good loser,” Trump said in the interview. “I don’t like to lose.”
Pressed by Wallace if he’s a “gracious” loser, Trump responded, “You don’t know until you see. It depends.”
Weeks before the 2016 presidential election, Trump said, when asked by Wallace during a presidential debate between him and then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton about whether he’d concede if he lost, that he would keep people in “suspense” about his plans.
“I will tell you at the time, Trump said then. “I’ll keep you in suspense.”
When discussing how the last presidential election turned out, Trump said that Clinton, who has been a vocal critic of his administration over the past few years, “never accepted her loss.”
Asked by Wallace another time during his interview on Sunday about whether he would accept this year’s results, as recent polls have shown presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden building a lead against him, Trump repeatedly said, “I have to see.”
“No, I’m not just going to say yes, I’m not going to say no, and I didn’t last time either,” he added.
In the same interview on Sunday, Trump also knocked a recent Fox News poll that showed Biden leading him by 8 points.
“I’m not losing, because those are fake polls,” he said in the interview. “They were fake in 2016 and now they’re even more fake. The polls were much worse in 2016.”
“Whoever does your Fox polls, they’re among the worst. They got it all wrong in 2016. They’ve been wrong on every poll I’ve ever seen,” Trump added.
In a statement to The Hill on Monday, Tim Murtaugh, communications director for the president’s reelection campaign, said “it is the stated goal of Democrats to eliminate protections for election integrity, such as mailing a ballot to every registered voter, whether they asked for one or not.”
“We already see widespread problems with mail-in voting, including in New York and New Jersey, with even a cat that’s been dead more than a decade receiving a ballot,” he continued, appearing to refer to a reported instance in Atlanta earlier this month.
Trump and a number of Republicans have pushed back against mail-in voting efforts that have seen increased support in recent months amid the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, saying that the practice comes with a substantial risk of fraud.
Federal Election Commission (FEC) Commissioner Ellen Weintraub has knocked such statements, saying back in May that “there’s simply no basis for the conspiracy theory that voting by mail causes fraud.”
Weintraub said the claims that voter fraud is widespread are “dead wrong,” “crying wolf,” “false,” and “a debunked lie.”
“Such falsehoods are not mere words,” she also said in a series of tweets at the time. “These falsehoods may well undermine the American people’s faith in our democracy. And the *real* fraud would be if U.S. citizens were deterred from voting and our government reflected the consent of fewer of the governed.”
—Updated Monday at 5:53 p.m.