For a few hours on election night, President Donald Trump struck an unfamiliar note: acceptance of Republican losses.
As the scale of the Democratic wave came into focus, Trump said he was “absolutely willing” to accept the results, crediting Democrats with running strong races against weak Republican candidates.
It was a striking, but ultimately temporary, departure for a president who has spent more than a decade peddling baseless claims of widespread election fraud when he loses. Trump spent his first two years back in office using nearly all the levers of the federal government to try to undermine long-established voting procedures and preemptively cast doubt on the midterms, insisting Republicans could lose only if Democrats cheated.
