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Many Republicans are still struggling to admit out loud that Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election.
Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton and Speaker Mike Johnson are the latest Republicans who can’t bring themselves to say that Trump lost the election.
Cotton was put under pressure by Kristen Welker on Sunday’s Meet the Press on NBC, where she gave him multiple opportunities to put the issue “to rest.”
Welker raised how JD Vance refused to say Trump lost the 2020 election during last week’s debate with Tim Walz and asked Cotton: “Can you say definitively here and now that Donald Trump did lose the 2020 election?”
“Kristen, Joe Biden was elected president in 2020,” Cotton replied. “It was an unfair election in many ways. You had states that were changing their election practices, election laws, sometimes in violation of the Constitution,” he added, before accusing television networks of working with big tech to “suppress” the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop which would expose “Biden family corruption.”
“But did Trump lose?” Welker asked again.
“Joe Biden was elected,” Cotton repeated, before explaining to her how the Electoral College works.
But the host wasn’t done.
“As you know though, it has been stated that this was one of the most secure elections in US history,” she continued. “But do you just not want to say that Trump lost? Why not just say…if Biden is president, can you just simply say ‘Trump lost’?”
“Joe Biden was elected president in 2020,” Cotton replied for a third time.
Speaker Johnson also refused to utter the statement aloud this morning. Appearing on ABC News’s This Week, he was asked whether he accepted the result of the 2020 election.
“You want us to litigate things that happened four years ago when we are talking about the future,” he said. “We are not going to talk about what happened in 2020, we are going to talk about 2024,” Johnson said.
He added: “Joe Biden has been the president for almost four years. Everybody needs to get over this and move forward.”
When pressed further, he said: “This is a gotcha game that’s played, and I’m not playing it.”
In last week’s vice presidential debate, Vance refused twice to admit that Trump lost the 2020 election.
The first time he swerved the question and said: “The media’s obsessed with talking about the election of four years ago. I’m focused on the election of 33 days from now because I want to throw Kamala Harris out of office and get back to common-sense economic policies.”
Walz, in one of his stronger moments of the night, asked him the question again.
“I’m focused on the future,” Vance replied.
“That is a damning nonanswer,” Walz said.
