Hillary Clinton formally concedes defeat the day after the 2016 presidential election.
Photo: Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Most viewers of the October 1 vice presidential debate, even those who thought J.D. Vance had won overall, had to acknowledge that his weakest moment came right at the end, when he dodged questions about the defiant denial of defeat by his running mate in 2020 and attempted to portray the “censorship” of news stories on Facebook as a greater threat to democracy than the violence carried out by Trump supporters on January 6, 2021. Vance remarkably and foolishly argued that Trump’s agreement to peacefully leave the White House before Biden’s inauguration after Biden’s inauguration The failure of the MAGA uprising proved that he had accepted defeat (never mind that Trump has since repeated his election denial claims hundreds of times and made the alleged theft of the presidency a major theme of his 2024 campaign). But Vance also snuck in a defense that should have attracted more attention because it was completely outrageous:

We must remember that Democrats in this country protested the outcome of the election for years. Hillary Clinton said in 2016 that the election was stolen from Donald Trump by Vladimir Putin because the Russians bought about $500,000 worth of Facebook ads. This has been going on for quite some time. And if we want to say that we should respect the outcome of the elections, I agree. But if we want to say, as Tim Walz says, this is just a problem that Republicans have had. I don’t buy that.

Let’s be clear about this. Hillary Clinton contacted Donald Trump to concede defeat five minutes after the Associated Press and other media outlets called the race for Republicans in the early hours of November 9, 2016. Later that day, she gave a formal concession speech, and there was zero ambiguity about her acceptance of the results:

I still believe in America and always will. And if you do, we must accept this result and then look to the future. Donald Trump will be our president. We owe him an open mind and the opportunity to lead.

Clinton and her campaign subsequently did not challenge the results nationally or in any state. Yes, there were some isolated attempts by individual Democrats in the House of Representatives to object to some state’s certification of the electoral vote on January 6, 2017, mainly to dramatize incidents of Republican voter suppression, but none was supported by Hillary Clinton, and they were all excluded. of order by Presiding Officer and Vice President Joe Biden. Three years Clinton later admitted how Russian interference could have had a decisive effect on Trump’s victory, but she never pursued any justification for that theory.

By contrast, Trump never conceded defeat in 2020, and still hasn’t to this day. He claimed victory on election night on what he was quite sure was a temporary lead that would quickly be reversed as many millions of perfectly legal ballots were counted. His campaign led to a flurry of dubious claims of voter fraud, all of which (with the small exception of a challenge to a detail of how Pennsylvania counted mail-in ballots, which did not involve enough ballots) were rejected by the courts. But he went ahead, convening fake panels of voters, pursuing dark and stupid legal theories for rejecting state-certified (including Republican state-certified) results, forcing Vice President Mike Pence to throw out electoral votes won by Biden, and when that all failed , encouraging a mob to “stop the steal” at the Capitol.

Comparing Trump’s actions to Clinton’s is absurd on its face, but beyond that, Vance refuses to acknowledge that Trump’s behavior regarding the 2020 results is unprecedented in the era since 1887, when federal laws for was the first to establish a clear timeline for decisively determining presidential elections. -election winners. Formal concessions from defeated presidential candidates became common in 1896. Since then, every loser has conceded except Trump. Yes, in 1916 a grumpy Charles Evans Hughes waited two weeks before congratulating Woodrow Wilson. And of course, Al Gore only threw in the towel in 2000 when the active lawsuits over the even and decisive Florida were resolved, but he relented as soon as the US Supreme Court ruled against him. Shrub v. Gore, and was not dependent on it for a moment intimidate his opponents. Losers of other very close races such as Richard Nixon in 1960, Hubert Humphrey in 1968, Gerald Ford in 1976 and John Kerry in 2004 all conceded within 24 hours of the polls closing on Election Day.

Donald Trump stands alone as the ultimate sore loser who, years later, can’t even admit he lost. And more importantly, he has been given every indication that he will behave exactly the same way if he loses on or shortly after November 5. For JD Vance to act like this is exactly what all politicians do is nonsense.