A former supporter of President Donald Trump argued on Monday that people who still back the Republican leader have done something both permanent and unforgivable.
“Of everything that Trump's done, this is the one thing that I thought, when he did it, the American people would forever banish him to like Siberia,” former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) said during a podcast he posted on Monday. “It's the one thing that Trump did that I can't move past, because it's the one thing that the American people did that I can just never, ever, ever forgive.”
Walsh then specified what he was referring to: Trump refusing to admit that he lost the 2020 election to former President Joe Biden
“The very first time in American history, a sitting American president lost an election and refused to accept the result,” Walsh said. “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 was not alone in assuming that Trump would lose all credibility with the American public if he refused to accept losing an election. Speaking with this journalist for Salon in 2019, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz — who later defended Trump during one of his impeachment trials, and who like Trump was close friends with the late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein — reassured both that Trump would never refuse to step down and that he would be spurned by the American people if he did.
“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.”
Speaking for his podcast in 2026, Walsh made the same point about why it is essential for people who lose elections to concede the result.
“Without that — without that — America ceases to exist,” Walsh said. “That agreement, Republican, Democrat, Independent: you work hard, there's a winner and there's a loser, and all of us accept what the people say. All of us. Whether we win or whether we lose. That has always been the deal. That has always been the beauty, the magic of this place. The peaceful transfer of power. The losing candidates concede, congratulate the winning candidates. The people have spoken. We'll fight another day.”
He added, “It's what every candidate agrees to. And I've been a candidate, and I've won and I've lost. But every time I've been a candidate, I've understood what the deal is, what this agreement is. The people of my district, or the people of my state, they get to decide. And I, as a candidate, whether I like it, whether it pisses me off, whether it saddens me — I accept what the people say. And in 2020, for the first time in American history, we had a candidate who said: F — — the people. F — — the American people. I don't give a f — — what the American people just decided. I do not accept what they decided.”
As conservative commentator and former presidential adviser George F. Will wrote in February, Trump’s claims regarding supposed election fraud in 2020 have already been thoroughly debunked, including by Republicans (like his own attorney general from the time, Bill Barr) who would otherwise be inclined to support Trump.
“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 wrote. “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 added, “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.”
Despite Trump being objectively proved to have lost to Biden in the 2020 election, the American people still rewarded him by electing him again in 2024.
“Six years later, what still saddens me more than anything else is that the American people did not make him pay for that,” Walsh said. “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 added, “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.”
