On the last episode of “Fox News Sunday” before Election Day, Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona raised an important criticism about Donald Trump: The former president, the Arizona senator said, is trying to “set up the conditions where he can do what he did in 2020.”
Host Shannon Bream quickly interrupted to say that Trump, at the end of his term, “did leave in 2020.” It fell to Kelly to remind the host and viewers that the Republican left office “after he sent a mob to Capitol Hill,” adding, “There are people who died that day because Donald Trump refused to accept the election.”
The exchange was notable for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was the familiarity of Bream’s argument. Indeed, it’s the line the former president’s defenders have peddled for nearly four years.
Yes, Trump rejected legitimate election results because he disapproved of the voters’ verdict. Yes, he tried to overturn the outcome in ways federal prosecutors believe were blatantly illegal. Yes, he filled his radicalized followers with lies, incited a riot, and deployed an armed mob to attack the U.S. Capitol, as part of a plot to seize illegitimate power by force.
But when it was time for his successor’s inauguration, Republicans argue, at least Trump left the White House when he was supposed to.
It was against this backdrop that the GOP candidate, just hours after Bream’s observation, expressed regret for having left the White House when he was supposed to. NBC News reported:
At another point in the [Pennsylvania] rally, Trump said he should not have left the White House on Jan. 20, 2021, when Biden was sworn in. “The day that I left, I shouldn’t have left. I mean, honestly, because we did so, we did so well,” the former president told supporters.
He didn’t appear to be kidding.
In other words, with just two days remaining before Election Day, as undecided voters made up their minds, the Republican nominee for the nation’s highest office reminded the public about his increasingly overt hostility toward democracy. This was, by all accounts, supposed to be a speech summarizing his closing message, focused on the stakes in the 2024 race. True to form, Trump departed from his script and focused anew on his post-defeat grievances from 2020. As The New York Times’ report on the rally summarized, “With the remarks, Mr. Trump used the final days of his campaign to offer voters a stark reminder of the violence that came at the end of his term when, after weeks of his false claims that he had won an election he had lost, a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol to try to prevent the certification of President Biden’s victory.” A Politico report, meanwhile, described Trump’s “shouldn’t have left” rhetoric as “a remarkable admission from a former president whose attempts to cling to power led to a deadly riot at the Capitol.” Welcome to Election Week 2024.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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