National Review editors bash Trump’s ‘disgraceful conduct since losing’ reelection

The National Review editorial board is drawing attention online for its sharp rebuke of President Trump’s actions challenging the results of the presidential election, which he lost to President-elect Joe Biden.

In a Monday editorial titled “Trump’s Disgraceful Endgame,” the conservative publication’s senior editorial staff referred to the president’s continued efforts to undermine the results as “disgraceful” and said “almost nothing that the Trump team has alleged has withstood the slightest scrutiny.” 

Trump immediately moved to challenge the results of the election in multiple courts after media outlets called the race in favor of his Democratic opponent on the Saturday after Election Day. Multiple legal efforts launched by his team and other Republicans have been thrown out even as the president has continued to repeat unsubstantiated claims about the race being “rigged.”

“In particular, it’s hard to find much that is remotely true in the president’s Twitter feed these days. It is full of already-debunked claims and crackpot conspiracy theories about Dominion voting systems,” the editorial said.

“Over the weekend, he repeated the charge that 1.8 million mail-in ballots in Pennsylvania were mailed out, yet 2.6 million were ultimately tallied. In a rather elementary error, this compares the number of mail-ballots requested in the primary to the number of ballots counted in the general,” the editorial board wrote. 

“A straight apples-to-apples comparison finds that 1.8 million mail-in ballots were requested in the primary and 1.5 million returned, while 3.1 million ballots were requested in the general and 2.6 million returned,” they continued.

“Flawed and dishonest assertions like this pollute the public discourse and mislead good people who make the mistake of believing things said by the president of the United States.”

The National Review said at the end of its piece that “getting defeated in a national election is a blow to the ego of even the most thick-skinned politicians and inevitably engenders personal feelings of bitterness and anger.”

“What America has long expected is that losing candidates swallow those feelings and at least pretend to be gracious,” it said. “If Trump’s not capable of it, he should at least stop waging war on the outcome.”

The rebuke from the conservative publication’s editorial staff prompted its name to trend on Twitter Monday afternoon. 

It is not the first time the magazine’s editors have knocked the president in an op-ed. Last year, the editorial board also called on the Senate GOP to vote for a resolution that blocked his emergency declaration for border wall funding.