Better late than never?

by Julianne McShane

It only took four years, but former President Donald Trump appears to be finally admitting that he lost the 2020 election.

In a podcast interview with Russian American computer scientist Lex Fridman that aired Tuesday, Trump acknowledged that he lost the presidential election “by a whisker.” (You can check out Trump’s comments around the 11:10 mark.) The surprising remarks follow a similar comment by Trump at a Moms for Liberty conference last week, saying Biden “beat us by a whisker”—before baselessly claiming that Democrats “used Covid to cheat.” At a press conference at the southern border last month, Trump said that he came up “just a little bit short” in the last election.

Of course, the race was not as close as Trump would like to believe: Biden won 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232, and the current president won more than 7 million more votes than Trump in the popular vote. Still, this is progress compared to Trump’s years of election denialism, which, of course, helped fuel the 2021 insurrection at the Capitol.

So why does Trump appear to be slowly embracing reality? It may have something to do with the fact that judges found more than 60 of his election lawsuits to be without merit. But the change could just as likely be related to the fact that election denialism is not a popular position: An ABC News/Ipsos poll released last week found that 81 percent of Americans are prepared to accept the election results no matter who wins, including 92 percent of Harris supporters and 76 percent of Trump supporters. Further, while 68 percent of Americans think Harris will be prepared to accept the outcome, only 29 percent think the same of Trump. But milquetoast, extremely delayed acknowledgments of reality may not be enough to convince voters that Trump is done with the lies, especially given his steadfast commitment to lying about, well, everything else.

Spokespeople for the Trump and Harris campaigns, and the White House, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.