When President Donald Trump refused to accept his loss to former President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, he transformed his party into one of “sore losers” — at least, according to a former Trump supporter.
“I talk about this all the time because it matters,” former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Il.) argued in a podcast on Monday. “Gosh darn it, it should matter that we have a president who lies as he breathes. And I understand that Donald Trump originated the lie — the Stolen Election Lie, the 2020 Stolen Election Lie. I understand that Trump originated that lie, and I understand completely that Donald Trump is the biggest sore loser in American history — maybe in all of human history. I get that. I understand that.”
Yet Walsh’s frustration is that Trump supporters, in order to back their preferred leader, have turned the Republican Party into “a party of liars and sore losers. Trump's responsible for starting that dangerous, undemocratic lie about a stolen election because Trump couldn't handle losing. But every damn Republican who has echoed that lie, who has internalized that lie, who believes that lie, who spreads that lie, is every bit as big of a liar and a sore loser as Donald Trump is.”
He added, “It just pains me — my former party. It just pains me. One of America's two major political parties has become a party of liars and sore losers, a party where 80-some percent of Republicans believe the 2020 election was stolen. They cannot accept the results of an American election.”
After reviewing how Trump’s acting attorney general Todd Blanche has perpetuated the president’s Big Lie, Walsh concluded that “I mean this when I say this: I was a Republican almost my entire adult life. I ran for Congress as a Republican. I became a Republican member of Congress. I ran for president in 2019 and 2020, tried to challenge Donald Trump, and ran as a Republican. I left the Republican Party six years ago.”
He concluded, “I don't have fun with this. This is not funny to me. This is not humorous to me. This pains me. My former political party is now fully a party of liars and sore losers. And they should be called liars and sore losers — every single Republican who echoes Trump's lie.”
This is not the first time that Walsh has denounced his party for supporting Trump’s debunked claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Earlier this month, Walsh described their decision something he literally could never forgive.
“Six years later, what still saddens me more than anything else is that the American people did not make him pay for that,” Walsh argued. “The American people did not hold him accountable for that. The American people did not stand up and say: ‘oh my f—— God, this doesn't happen in America. You're running for Congress, you're running for the Senate, you're running for mayor, you're running for dog catcher, you're running for president — man, woman, whoever you are, you accept the result. You lose, you accept the result.’ Get out of here!”
He concluded, “That the American people did not say — of everything Trump's done, that with that one, not accepting an election result, that the American people, no matter our political divide, did not stand up and say: ‘Get lost. How dare you. How dare you attack this representative democracy?’ It's a — I don't mind saying it, and if it offends people, I don't care — it will be the one thing that I will never forgive the American people for.”
In February conservative commentator and former presidential adviser George F. Will reviewed in The Washington Post that Trump’s claims have already been thoroughly debunked, including by fellow Republicans whose self-interest involved supporting Trump (like his own attorney general from the time, Bill Barr).
“Someone should read to him ‘Lost, Not Stolen,’ a 2022 report by eight conservatives (two former Republican senators, three former federal appellate judges, a former Republican solicitor general, and two Republican election law specialists),” Will explained. “They examined all 187 counts in the 64 court challenges filed in multiple states by Trump and his supporters. Twenty cases were dismissed before hearings on their merits, 14 were voluntarily dismissed by Trump and his supporters before hearings. Of the 30 that reached hearings on the merits, Trump’s side prevailed in only one, Pennsylvania, involving far too few votes to change the state’s result.”
Will concluded, “Trump’s batting average? .016. In Arizona, the most exhaustively scrutinized state, a private firm selected by Trump’s advocates confirmed Trump’s loss, finding 99 additional Biden votes and 261 fewer Trump votes.” Therefore he wrote of Trump, “The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind.”