Opinion | Harris Shows Trump How to Concede

Opinion

Harris Shows Trump How to Concede

• Share full article
• 85

By Jesse Wegman

Editorial Board Member

Less than 12 hours after the presidential election was called early Wednesday morning, Vice President Kamala Harris did what Donald Trump still can’t bring himself to do four years after his own loss: She conceded.

“Earlier today I spoke to President-elect Trump and congratulated him on his victory,” she said Wednesday afternoon, speaking before dejected supporters at Howard University in Washington. “I also told him that we will help him and his team with his transition, and that we will engage in a peaceful transfer of power.” That principle, she said, is what distinguishes democracy from monarchy or tyranny.

She performed this task with clarity and grace, a fairly low bar that used to be expected of all losing politicians in this country, and for a simple reason: When you live in a democracy, accepting your losses is what you have to do. Not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard.

Especially when it’s hard. Al Gore and Hillary Clinton conceded in the wake of their own agonizing losses in 2000 and 2016, even though they both won more votes than their opponents.

And yet somehow Trump gets a pass from this most basic requirement — not simply for refusing to acknowledge his own defeat in 2020, but also for lying about a “stolen” election, violating the laws and the Constitution, and then inciting a violent insurrection at the Capitol in an effort to overturn it. Despite all this, a few minutes after noon on Jan. 20, 2025, the federal criminal prosecution of him for this abuse of trust (not to mention for stealing and hoarding quantities of highly classified documents) will vanish into thin air.

So forgive me if I scoff at the “Where is Kamala?” memes that circulated on Wednesday before she went on camera. No one in America is worse at accepting defeat than Trump and his followers. And that’s because under his tutelage, most of the Republican Party has come to believe that the only legitimate elections are the ones that it wins.

Contrast this with all the conspiracy theories you are not hearing right now about Trump’s vote totals. For example, we learned Wednesday that Nye County, Nev., a Trump-friendly rural county, did not report many thousands of votes in its initial tally. It’s a significant oversight, as those votes could end up costing Democrats a hotly contested Senate seat.

Now imagine the parties were reversed: Republicans would be raging about fraud, with neither evidence nor good faith — as Trump did Tuesday afternoon, claiming there was “massive CHEATING” in Philadelphia even before the polls closed. There was not, of course, nor was there any fraud in Nye County; minor mistakes happen all the time in elections involving hundreds of millions of people. Yet because it’s the Republican candidate who will likely benefit from this mistake, everyone is suddenly quiet.

This is the world we now live in: One party follows basic rules and norms of democratic politics and loses, and the other lies, cheats and tries to steal — and wins. It’s reverse accountability. And it can’t be sustained.

That is, it can’t be sustained in a democracy that prizes fairness and faithfulness to the law. In America, by contrast, it may be the way things are for the foreseeable future.