For a few hours on election night, President Donald Trump struck an unfamiliar note: acceptance of Republican losses.
As the scale of the Democratic wave came into focus, Trump said he was “absolutely willing” to accept the results, crediting Democrats with running strong races against weak Republican candidates.
It was a striking, but ultimately temporary, departure for a president who has spent more than a decade peddling baseless claims of widespread election fraud when he loses. Trump spent his first two years back in office using nearly all the levers of the federal government to try to undermine long-established voting procedures and preemptively cast doubt on the midterms, insisting Republicans could lose only if Democrats cheated.
By Monday, Trump was back to his old habits.
“Does anybody really believe that this ‘Election’ was honest,” he asked on Truth Social, questioning how Democrats had amassed so many early votes and claiming the numbers made it “impossible” for Republicans to win.
The reversal underscored the whiplash among some of MAGA’s loudest voices, who have long promoted a sprawling catalog of false theories: illegal immigrants voting en masse, “deep state” Democrats manufacturing votes and foreign adversaries hacking machines to flip results.
But after last week’s Republican rout and Trump’s short-lived conciliatory tone, those allies turned on one another — trading a once-united chorus of fraud claims for a bitter round of infighting.
Some longtime...
For a few hours on election night, President Donald Trump struck an unfamiliar note: acceptance of Republican losses. As the scale of the Democratic wave came into focus, Trump said he was “absolu...