President Trump won’t agree to accept 2020 election results as Biden leads in polls — ‘I have to see’
US President Donald Trump speaks to the press in the Oval Office at the White House after receiving a briefing from top law enforcement officials on operations against the MS-13 gang in Washington, DC, on July 15, 2020.
Nicholas Kamm | AFP | Getty Images
President Donald Trump declined Sunday to say he would accept the results of the 2020 election, adding that he will “have to see” and claiming without evidence that mail-in voting will “rig the election.”
Trump’s comments came during a wide-ranging interview with “Fox News Sunday” host Chris Wallace in which he criticized so-called cancel culture and repeatedly downplayed the coronavirus, which has infected more than 3.7 million people in the U.S. and killed at least 140,131, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.
During the interview, Wallace debuted the results of Fox News’ latest national poll, which showed Democratic candidate for president Joe Biden leading Trump by 8%. The poll showed Biden leading on specific issues as well, including a 1% lead over Trump on the economy.
When presented with the results, Trump downplayed the findings as “fake polls.”
“First of all, I’m not losing because those are fake polls,” he said. “They were fake in 2016 and now they’re even more fake.”
Later in the interview, when Wallace asked whether Trump is a “gracious” loser, the president responded that “it depends” and repeated claims he has made in the past that mail-in voting could lead to widespread voter fraud.
With the coronavirus spreading rapidly across large swaths of the U.S., some states have made efforts to more readily accommodate mail-in voting to reduce the risk of infection at in-person voting locations come November. Trump has previously attacked efforts made by officials in Michigan and Nevada to expand vote-by-mail access, repeatedly saying that they will lead to voter fraud, though he hasn’t presented evidence to back up that claim.
“I think mail-in voting is going to rig the election,” he said in Sunday’s interview. “I really do.”
Wallace pressed Trump on whether he will accept the results of the 2020 election, but Trump declined to answer the question directly.
“I have to see. Look, you—I have to see,” he said. “No, I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say no.”
