Trump concedes…the 2020 election. Why isn’t this a bigger news story?

It took four years but Donald Trump is finally pivoting to the truth about the 2020 election. In three public appearances, the most recent on September 3, Mr Trump admitted, at long last, that he lost the presidential election.

The three times he’s said this are as follows:

Each time, he tried to play down the extent of his defeat.

To Mr Fridman and Moms for Liberty he said he lost “by a whisker” (you’ll find the admission somewhere around the 11:10 mark in the podcast). This, despite the reality that Joe Biden won 306 Electoral College votes to Mr Trump’s 232 and also won 7 million more votes than Mr Trump in the popular vote. Perhaps the “whisker” was the fact that, as NPR’s Domenico Montanaro has put it, “just 44,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona and Wisconsin separated Biden and Trump from a tie in the Electoral College”.

Anyway, at his press conference at the southern border of the United States in August, Mr Trump declared that he came up “just a little bit short” in the last election.

So there’s an attempt to deny the scale of his loss — 44,000 votes gave Mr Biden 74 more votes than in the Electoral College. But least Mr Trump has finally — one insurrection, roughly 60 court cases and four years later — acknowledged what every one knew: Donald Trump lost the 2020 election and Joe Biden won it decisively.

Why Mr Trump has finally decided to admit (kinda) to the truth is obvious: election denialism is not popular with Americans, as an ABC News/Ipsos poll released on August 30 found.

But what isn’t immediately clear is why Mr Trump’s election concession — dissembling though it is — four years late, is not a bigger news story.

Hardly any outlet is according it the attention it deserves, which raises a truly dismal possibility: The media doesn’t believe that some version of truth is dimly hewing into view for Mr Trump because he went on in the Fridman podcast to call the election a “fraud”.

Despite that, I still think it’s a story worth spending some time on. Or as we used to say in the old days, worth some column inches.

Originally published at https://www.rashmee.com