One thousand three hundred eighty-eight days after the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump appeared to tacitly admit that he lost to Joe Biden.
Almost four years of denials gave way to one seemingly innocuous throwaway line, made while Trump held a press availability Thursday about immigration issues near a stretch of wall on the Arizona side of the U.S.-Mexico border.
Holding up a printed copy of a graph that purportedly shows migrant encounter stats at the southern border, and which was on display the moment he was the target of an assassination attempt at a July rally in Bethel Park, Pennsylvania, Trump spoke, as he often does, of his proclaimed hard-line immigration policies. He pointed to a supposed downturn in encounters that he said occurred at the end of his presidency, and then out came the slip.
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“This was the last week in office for me because of a horrible, horrible election where I got many millions more votes than I did the first time, but didn’t quite make it, just a little bit short,” Trump said. “Just a little bit short.” It certainly lacks the unrestrained zeal of “Stop the Steal.”
(The graph, which Trump says saved his life because he gestured toward it in the fraction of a second before he was shot in the ear, was originated from Sen. Ron Johnson’s office and actually omits a rise in migrant encounters at the end of Trump’s term, ABC News determined.)
In addition to his unprecedented effort to overturn the 2020 election results, which culminated in an attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters, the former president has repeatedly made false claims that the election was stolen from him. A slew of his former allies, including members of his own legal team, pleaded guilty to interfering in the Georgia 2020 election.
Biden received 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232 in 2020, and nearly 6 million more ballots were cast in Biden’s favor in the popular vote, which Biden won 51.3 percent to 46.8 percent.
Trump has remained seemingly obsessed with the baseless assertion that he was cheated, having met with House Speaker Mike Johnson at his Mar-a-Lago resort in April to discuss “election integrity.”
During the first presidential debate, Trump refused multiple times to unequivocally state that he would accept the results of this year’s election, saying he would only accept a “fair and legal and good election.” That refusal was overshadowed by Biden’s disastrous performance, which led to his eventual exit from the presidential race.
