November 15, 2020

Donald Trump Wants You to Know That He Definitely Did Not Just Concede the Election

Donald Trump, totally not conceding.Evan Vucci/AP

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For a brief time Sunday morning, Donald Trump appeared to accept reality. Nearly eight days after every major media outlet had declared Joe Biden the winner of the presidential election, Trump took to Twitter and stated that Biden had “won” the race.

Of course, Trump couldn’t bring himself to admit that Biden had won because the former VP got more votes in enough states to earn a decisive Electoral College majority. Instead, Trump falsely claimed the election had been “Rigged” and attributed Biden’s victory to an array of bogus conspiracy theories. And he did so while promoting a video from Fox News’ Jesse Watters, who told viewers he has a “gut feeling” that the election was fraudulent. “It’s like a feeling a parent gets when something happens to their child when they aren’t there,” Watters said. “You just know it.”

But still, there it was, clearly stated on the president’s favorite media platform: Biden won.

And after a week in which Trump and his team had launched an all-out effort to steal the election, this was big news. On NBC’s Meet the Press, Chuck Todd reported that Trump’s tweet appeared to be the “beginning of a concession process” and asked Biden’s incoming chief of staff, Ron Klain, for his reaction.

Klain called Trump’s tweet “a further confirmation of the reality that Joe Biden won the election” and added that “if the president’s prepared to begin to recognize that reality, that’s positive.”

Alas, Trump is not actually prepared to recognize that reality. Clearly angered by the reaction to his words, the current president issued more tweets. “I concede NOTHING!” he declared. “We have a long way to go.”

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