Donnie Trump Was Right.

He just needed more confidence in himself, and enough cognitive capacity to remember how right he'd been.

Obviously, there's been a ton of discussion about the recent debate between the two main presumed presidential candidates.  And there's been considerable criticism of each of them.

One sustained criticism of Donnie Trump has been that he lied continually.  That, in itself, is not a valuable criticism.  First of all, he always lies continually, and second, Biden fell down badly on the job, and did not call out Donnie on his continual lies.  Some people have criticized the moderators for not calling out Donnie on his non-stop lies, but this is unfair.  It wasn't their job to fact-check Donnie.  It was Biden's job, and Biden, for whatever array of proposed reasons, didn't do it.

But there was one question that people who complain about Donnie and his inveterate lying, and dodging, keep referencing.  They say, in a way which is not technically true, that Donnie did not answer the question about whether he would accept any election result that was determined.  Sometimes, they say he didn't answer the question, and sometimes, they admit that he did answer the question, but he qualified it by saying he would accept a result if it was fair and correct.  And that, in fact, is what he did say.

People pay so much attention to January 6, 2021, that they forget what preceded it.  The fact is that Donnie's pre-J6 theory was the same as the one he articulated last week.  Yeah, I know.  "Articulated" doesn't seem to be the right word to use when we're talking about Donnie Trump.  And even if we used the word said instead of articulated, the purists among us would point out that Donnie lies so continually that it doesn't matter what he says.  But the facts are that he was asked if he would accept a result, he tried to dodge the question, it was repeated for him in case he didn't hear, forgot, or was trying to weasel out of it, and he did grudgingly say he would accept any result as long as it was fair and correct.  No one, of course, would be criticized for asking how anyone would know if a result was fair and correct, and in whose estimation.

But coming back to how right Donnie was, we could start 20 years before that.  Al Gore ran against George W Bush, the vote-counting was manipulated to stop while Bush was ahead, and Gore's reflex was not to accept the loss.  He took the matter to court.  He took it to the Supreme Court.  The vote count had been stopped in Florida, where Bush's cousin was in charge of elections, and Bush's brother was governor, and the Supreme Court happened to be sympathetic (biased) to Republicans, so they agreed to let Florida decide.  So Gore lost, and he accepted his loss.

In 2020, Donnie lost an election (popular vote and Electoral College), and he, like Gore, didn't think this loss was fair and correct.  He had some theories.  They were unsupported, but they were his theories.  So he did what Gore did: he took the matter to court.  Over 60 times.  Some of the judges had themselves been appointed by Trump, but even so, he lost every attempt to get the result he thought was unfair and incorrect overturned.  But he did the right thing.

I do admit Donnie was wrong to have raged around claiming to have won an election he had already proven to himself over 60 times he lost, and to have encouraged people to invade and attack the Capitol to change a result he'd already correctly confirmed for himself (but didn't like).

But he was right to have agreed to accept an election result only on condition that it was fair and correct, and to have brought the matter to court when there was doubt in his...mind.