So, as former president Donald Trump was trying to persuade a group of historians to view his presidency as an unqualified success, he let it slip out: He had lost the 2020 election.
“By [my] not winning the election, he was the happiest man,” Trump said of South Korean President Moon Jae-in. See, Trump was explaining, he was going to make South Korea pay a ton of money for the United States to maintain its bases in his country. But there it was: Trump saying he didn’t win the election. A few sentences later, he was more explicit. “We had a deal. He was going to pay $5 billion — $5 billion a year. But when I didn’t win the election, he had to be the happiest.”
The patter kept rolling — maybe China was happiest, maybe Russia (of course), maybe Iran. But the reality was already out there, floating in the room apparently unnoticed by the president who had worked so hard to deny it and by observers who understood it solely as a statement of fact.
This comment, though, may be important some months from now in a very different context. Does it prove, beyond reasonable doubt, that Trump knew his false claims about the election were false? Will the admission that he lost convince a jury someday that the president of the United States committed a crime?
No jury may ever be asked that question. It’s not clear where the investigation into the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, will lead or whether the House select committee’s probe or a separate Justice Department investigation...
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