Former President Donald Trump was asked during a CNN town hall if he would commit to accepting the results of the 2024 presidential election.
Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican nomination, was presented with the question by CNN moderator Kaitlan Collins at the live, televised event held in New Hampshire.
The former president responded that he'd only accept the results on one condition.
“Yeah, if I think it’s an honest election, absolutely,” he said.
Collins didn’t accept his response and pressed on whether the former president would still accept the results regardless of the outcome.
“If I think it’s an honest election, I would be honored to,” Trump responded.
In its report, CNN framed the response as showing that Trump said he “he would not commit to accepting the results regardless of the outcome, saying that he would do so if he believes ‘it’s an honest election.’”
The CNN forum marked the first major televised event of the 2024 presidential campaign.
Trump on 2020 Election
At the town hall, Trump reiterated his belief that the 2020 election was “rigged.” He noted that his loss was due to multiple factors not limited to voter fraud, but also the social media forces working against him leading up to the election, as well as a controversial letter signed by intel veterans that pushed against the Hunter Biden laptop story at the time, calling it Russian disinformation.
An ex-CIA official later said the Biden campaign was behind the letter. Yesterday, a new congressional report revealed that a CIA official helped recruit people to sign the letter.
Throughout the town hall on Wednesday, Trump refused to say that the 2020 election was not rigged.“You and your supporters lost more than 60 court cases on the election,” Collins told Trump. “It’s been nearly two and a half years. Can you publicly acknowledge that you did lose the 2020 election?”
In response, Trump told Collins that there has been video evidence of ballot boxes being stuffed.
“They found millions of votes on camera, on government cameras, where they were stuffing ballot boxes. So with all of that, I think it’s a shame what happened. I think it’s a very sad thing for our country. I think it’s a very sad thing, frankly, for the world because if you look at what’s gotten to our country, our country has gone to hell.”
During the question and answer session, he also continued to refer to the 2020 election as being a stolen one.
“When you look at what happened during that election, unless you’re a very stupid person, you see what happened,” Trump said. “It was a rigged election, and it was a shame that we had to go through it.”
Call with Georgia Secretary of State
Trump and Collins discussed multiple aspects of his efforts to challenge the 2020 election. This included the phone call Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican. Trump asserted that he “I didn’t ask them to find anything.”The phone call in question occurred in January 2021, and during the conversation, Trump asked the secretary of state to probe potential voter fraud in Georgia. “I just want to find 11,780 votes,” Trump had told Raffensperger, referring to a figure that is one more than he lost by.
“He’s not saying I want you to create the vote,” said Dershowitz in the interview. “He’s not saying I want you to manufacture or concoct the votes. He’s saying, and he’s been saying this for months, on Twitter and his statements and his campaigns, he thinks that people voted for him and those votes weren’t counted.
“He’s entitled as a citizen, as a candidate, to say, ‘I want you to find those votes, I want you to find the votes that will pass for me and what weren’t counted, I want you to find votes that were cast against me that shouldn’t have been counted—by people who are dead people, who are out of state.”
The full transcript of the call showed that Trump asserted that he won the state and asked the election official to probe election irregularities—something he had been repeating publicly.
