U.S. President Donald Trump attends the 56th annual World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, January 21, 2026. REUTERS/Romina Amato
According to a former pro-Trump lawmaker, President Donald Trump’s greatest legacy is being a sore loser — and he is eroding American democracy by spreading that mindset to other Republicans.
“I've said repeatedly — ad nauseam — that Donald Trump's greatest legacy is the destruction of truth,” former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) said in a podcast posted on Tuesday. “Not a surprise, right, when this good, great, decent country puts into the White House twice somebody who lies every time he opens his mouth.
Walsh continued that Trump’s “greatest legacy is not winning twice and not getting to the White House twice. His greatest legacy — you want to understand Donald Trump's greatest legacy?
Here it is: Sixty — depending on the poll you look at — 60, 70, 80, 90 percent of one of our two major political parties believes right now that Donald Trump won the 2020 election. That right there is Trump's legacy. That right there is Trump's greatest legacy.”
Walsh pointed out that it imperils democracy for a “vast majority” of one of America’s two major parties to believe that whenever their candidate loses, it means the other candidate was cheating.
“When you look at what's happening in California since their primary election last week, it just reaffirms this point,” Walsh explained. “It expands Trump's legacy. Not only is Donald Trump's greatest legacy — and none of this is good — his greatest legacy is the destruction of truth. His greatest legacy is that he has turned the Republican Party into a party of sore losers, into a party of election deniers, into a party of democracy haters. Trump's greatest legacy is convincing Republicans not to accept the results of elections where their candidate loses. His greatest legacy is convincing Republicans that every time their side loses, it was rigged, it was stolen. Trump did that. Trump turned the Republican Party into that. A party that, when they lose now, never lost — it was stolen.”
While he added that “this is so easy to make fun of,” Walsh finds it difficult to do so “because I can think of nothing more destructive that Trump has done than convincing one of our two political parties not to accept election losses. I can't think of anything more destructive to our democracy that Trump has done than that.”
Prior to Trump, every president who lost an election peacefully relinquished power, tracing all the way back to President John Adams in 1800. Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2019, Harvard law professor and Trump impeachment defense attorney Alan Dershowitz cited this precedent in denying that Trump would try to overturn the 2020 election if he lost.
“No president will refuse to step down if his opponent is elected in his place,” Dershowitz told Salon at the time. “It just will not happen, and the American public would never tolerate it.”
Despite Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was stolen, conservative commentator and former presidential adviser George F. Will broke down in February how Trump’s claims have been thoroughly debunked, including by many Republicans such as his own attorney general, Bill Barr, and his own vice president, Mike Pence.
“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 continued, “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.”
In May, discussing Trump’s being a sore loser, Walsh said that he believed the president became unforgivable “the very first time in American history, a sitting American president lost an election and refused to accept the result. I still believe to this day the American people, all of us, no matter anyone's politics, should have turned their backs on him — all of us — and told him to just get the hell out of our lives. We're done with you. That's the one thing. Because it's the thread by which this representative democracy hangs together, keeps it together.”
Walsh added, “Six years later, what still saddens me more than anything else is that the American people did not make him pay for that. 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!”