It only took four years, but former President Donald Trump appears to be finally admitting that he lost the 2020 election.

In a podcast interview with Russian American computer scientist Lex Fridman that aired Tuesday, Trump acknowledged that he lost the presidential election “by a whisker.” (You can check out Trump’s comments around the 11:10 mark.) The surprising remarks follow a similar comment by Trump at a Moms for Liberty conference last week, saying Biden “beat us by a whisker”—before baselessly claiming that Democrats “used Covid to cheat.” At a press conference at the southern border last month, Trump said that he came up “just a little bit short” in the last election.

Of course, the race was not as close as Trump would like to believe: Biden won 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232, and the current president won more than 7 million more votes than Trump in the popular vote. Still, this is progress compared to Trump’s years of election denialism, which, of course, helped fuel the 2021 insurrection at the Capitol.

So why does Trump appear to be slowly embracing reality? It may have something to do with the fact that judges found more than 60 of his election lawsuits to be without merit. But the change could just as likely be related to the fact that election denialism is not a popular position: An ABC News/Ipsos poll released last week found that 81 percent of Americans are prepared to accept the election results no matter who wins, including 92 percent of Harris supporters and 76 percent of Trump supporters. Further, while 68 percent of Americans think Harris will be prepared to accept the outcome, only 29 percent think the same of Trump. But milquetoast, extremely delayed acknowledgments of reality may not be enough to convince voters that Trump is done with the lies, especially given his steadfast commitment to lying about, well, everything else.

Spokespeople for the Trump and Harris campaigns, and the White House, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

It only took four years, but former President Donald Trump appears to be finally admitting that he lost the 2020 election.

In a podcast interview with Russian American computer scientist Lex Fridman that aired Tuesday, Trump acknowledged that he lost the presidential election “by a whisker.” (You can check out Trump’s comments around the 11:10 mark.) The surprising remarks follow a similar comment by Trump at a Moms for Liberty conference last week, saying Biden “beat us by a whisker”—before baselessly claiming that Democrats “used Covid to cheat.” At a press conference at the southern border last month, Trump said that he came up “just a little bit short” in the last election.

Of course, the race was not as close as Trump would like to believe: Biden won 306 electoral votes to Trump’s 232, and the current president won more than 7 million more votes than Trump in the popular vote. Still, this is progress compared to Trump’s years of election denialism, which, of course, helped fuel the 2021 insurrection at the Capitol.

So why does Trump appear to be slowly embracing reality? It may have something to do with the fact that judges found more than 60 of his election lawsuits to be without merit. But the change could just as likely be related to the fact that election denialism is not a popular position: An ABC News/Ipsos poll released last week found that 81 percent of Americans are prepared to accept the election results no matter who wins, including 92 percent of Harris supporters and 76 percent of Trump supporters. Further, while 68 percent of Americans think Harris will be prepared to accept the outcome, only 29 percent think the same of Trump. But milquetoast, extremely delayed acknowledgments of reality may not be enough to convince voters that Trump is done with the lies, especially given his steadfast commitment to lying about, well, everything else.

Spokespeople for the Trump and Harris campaigns, and the White House, did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Earlier this month, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican who oversees mail-in voting, voter registration, and property records in America’s fourth-largest county, reached out to Elon Musk with an invitation.

“Can I please give you a tour of our election facility and mail voting process,” he wrote on Musk’s social-media platform, X, after the red-pilled billionaire declared that “electronic voting machines” and “anything mailed in” were “too risky” to use in elections.

“You can go into all the rooms,” Richer continued. ”You can examine all the equipment. You can ask any question you want. We’d love to show you the security steps already in place, which I think are very sound.”

For three-and-a-half years, Richer has been asking skeptical Republicans just to hear him out about how elections really work in the most closely contested county in the nation’s most closely contested state. First elected in 2020 amid right-wing fears about George Soros, Richer, a Federalist Society lawyer, emerged as one of the nation’s most outspoken voices against the myth of stolen outcomes. He held the line against election deniers such as Kari Lake (who Richer is currently suing for defamation) while attempting to make the election process as transparent as possible. Richer opened the doors to the county’s Tabulation and Election Center for more than 150 tours, turned the security cameras on 24/7 for people to watch at home, and tirelessly fielded questions on Musk’s platform—all while facing a stream of violent threats and criticism. 

But it turned out that good cheer and transparency could only accomplish so much. Musk, for one, did not take Richer up on the offer. And on Tuesday, Richer finally ran out of time to change his fellow Republicans’ minds: He lost his primary to state Rep. Justin Heap, a member of legislature’s Freedom Caucus, who was backed by many of the state’s most prominent election deniers. The single-digit margin only tells a part of the story; with another Richer critic running a strong third, just 36 percent of Republican voters backed the incumbent. 

Heap managed to never say whether he thought the 2020 or 2022 elections were stolen during his campaign. But he didn’t really have to. To understand what he represented and why he was running, you only had to look at the endorsements he racked up from many of the biggest names in what Richer has called Arizona’s “cottage industry” of election denial.

Chief among those backers was Lake, who ran for governor in 2022 while calling for her Democratic opponent to be imprisoned for the 2020 presidential election to be “decertified,” and is still—still!—attempting to get a court to declare her the winner of a race she lost by 17,000 votes. Lake—who in her memoir described a lengthy dream sequence she had about being kidnapped by Richer, taken to the desert, and nearly murdered—is now the Republican nominee for US Senate.

Another prominent supporter was Tyler Bowyer, the chief operating officer for Turning Point Action, who was indicted in April for his role in the 2020 fake elector scheme. Heap had the support of Arizona Reps. Paul Gosar (who coordinated with “Stop the Steal” leaders on January 6th), and Andy Biggs (who tried to round up support for the state’s fake electors in the run-up to the Electoral College certification). As the Arizona Mirror reported in April, one of the people who nudged Heap into running was his colleague in the statehouse, state Rep. Jake Hoffman—another fake elector.

The vitriol Richer faced from current party leaders was intense. Earlier this year, Shelby Busch, the vice chair of the Maricopa County Republican party told an audience that if it was up to her, she “would lynch” Richer. Busch, who later said that she was joking, went on to lead the state party’s delegation to the Republican National Convention.

Because of the way elections are run in the county, a new recorder can’t just rewrite the rules on his own terms. The Board of Supervisors is responsible for tabulation and election-day voting, for instance, and the state’s vote-by-mail system and use of electronic voting machines are set by statute. But notably, Heap has voted to get rid of both of those things, while also voting to mandate hand-counts. (At the same time, Heap is running to be Recorder on the promise of speeding up the counting of votes, which a hand count is not likely to accomplish.)

With support from independents and hard-earned respect from some Democrats, Richer was in a decent position to win a second term if he managed to survive the primary. One Indivisible activist from Scottsdale, who took an election-facility tour with Richer, told me that Richer was going to be the first Republican she ever voted for. But Heap’s victory is far from guaranteed in a county where Democrats have won a succession of key races by appealing to independents and moderate Republicans. On Tuesday, Democrats nominated Tim Stringham, an Army and Navy veteran who previously served as a JAG attorney. 

When we spoke in June, Stringham told me that he had entered the race reluctantly, after being nudged by the county Democratic party. But he cited Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election as a pivotal moment in his decision to become more involved in politics.

“And as a veteran, somebody who’s gone 10,000 miles and risked being blown up to defend democracy, you start feeling a little bit silly. My wife is back in Arizona, what the hell am I doing?”

“Watching on TV, and being like, holy cow, the President of the United States is really trying to overthrow the republic here,” Stringham said. “And I always tell people that it’s like, you know, if there’s just a riot, there’s just a riot, those things happen. But somebody actually handed fake electoral votes to Mike Pence and said we want you to read these votes. They no-shit tried to overthrow the Constitution. And as a veteran, somebody who’s gone 10,000 miles and risked being blown up to defend democracy, you start feeling a little bit silly.”

“‘My wife is back in Arizona, what the hell am I doing?,'” he said, recalling his thought process at the time. “‘I’m clearly not in the right place to actually protect American democracy.'”

Stringham did not believe there was a “huge philosophical difference” between he and Richer on how the recorder’s office was run, but he was adamant about wanting to preserve the availability of ballot drop-boxes and protect vote-by-mail from Republican legislators’ attempts to end it.

The incumbent’s defeat is a setback for election officials who have faced threats and tried to clarify the process amid a deluge of misinformation. Scores of election workers across the country, and particularly in Arizona, are leaving their jobs in part due to the added strain of dealing with sometimes-armed conspiracy theorists and endless lawsuits. In Maricopa, Republican county supervisor Bill Gates, who joined Richer in defending the election process in 2022, chose not to run for re-election this year and has talked publicly about suffering from PTSD. Another Republican supervisor who has been a target of election deniers, Jack Sellers, lost his primary on Tuesday too. It’s tough to see how things might have played out differently in recent years if the people screaming about stopping the steal also had allies in some of the most important election administration positions in the land. But it probably wouldn’t have been great.

Richer’s loss won’t, at least, have much of an effect on how the 2024 election is conducted. The recorder’s term won’t end until January—meaning that the lame-duck Republican will still be around to do one last job this November.

Rudy Giuliani has a message for Democrats: Their rhetoric, especially President Joe Biden’s, has been “an invitation of violence.”

Democrats “get away with murder because there’s a two-tier system of justice,” Giuliani told me outside the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin on Monday afternoon. “They can do the worst things in the world—nobody pays attention. We can make little mistakes, and they become world class.”

This is, of course, the same Rudy Giuliani who spoke to MAGA supporters ahead of the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, calling for “trial by combat.”

It’s also the same Giuliani who falsely accused a temporary election official in Fulton, Georgia of manipulating ballots in the 2020 election—a claim that Trump echoed when he said that worker, Ruby Freeman, was a “vote scammer” in his infamous phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger alleging widespread fraud. Based on these allegations, a mob of election-integrity skeptics also appeared at Freeman’s house on January 6, 2021; luckily the FBI was able to warn her that her safety was at risk, allowing her to flee in time. (Giuliani was found liable for defamation and was ordered to pay Freeman and her daughter $148 million in damages in 2023. In separate court proceedings, Giuliani was disbarred by a New York state appeals court in July).

At #RNC2024 @RudyGiuliani says Democrats "get away with murder", where as Republicans are only responsible for "little mistakes"—in response to @abbyvesoulis's question about heated political rhetoric after the weekend's violence.

"They can do the worst things in the world.… pic.twitter.com/m4SVFrZYyq

— Mother Jones (@MotherJones) July 15, 2024

But a few days after the assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, Giuliani appears to have memory-holed the part he and other Republicans played in promoting the 2020 election denialism that culminated in the violence on January 6, including the resulting casualties of Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick and Trump devotee Ashli Babbitt. Giuliani’s argument that left-wing messaging—such as accusing Trump of being a danger to Democracy or a fascist—led to Trump being shot at on July 13 was widely held among the half a dozen politicians and other Republican convention-goers I spoke to.

Waverly Woods, an RNC attendee from Virginia Beach, joked that Biden may as well have pulled the trigger himself. “You can’t kill your opponent because he’s winning,” she says. “Apparently you can search his house and his wife’s underwear, and you can spy on his campaign, but I think killing him might be going a little too far.”

Several interviewees pointed out Biden’s comment in a call to donors a few days before the rally shooting, when he said it was time to “put Trump in the bullseye,” as a prime example of Democrats inciting violence. (“That was pretty bad,” according to Giuliani.) But several convention attendees contended that Democrats have been stoking violence with their rhetoric for years.

“The guy that shot up a [baseball] field in Washington, DC—that was very rhetoric driven,” Alabama convention attendee Bryan Dawson says of the 2017 shooting that severely insured then-Majority Whip Steve Scalise at a Republican baseball practice session. Regarding the shooting at the Trump rally in Pennsylvania, Dawson says it was either “a coup at the highest levels, and they were letting him be on the roof to shoot Donald Trump, or it was rhetoric driven—because those are the only two options.”

“Anytime there’s political violence, it’s only going one direction. Anytime there’s cities being burned, it’s one group of people doing it. You never see people with a hat like this out doing anything violent,” adds Dawson, pointing to his red Make America Great Again hat. “We might say say some things or whatever, but it’s nowhere near the rhetoric or the constant propaganda that’s coming from the left.”

Perhaps Dawson forgot about January 6 attack; or about the rally in Ohio this past spring when Trump warned of a “bloodbath” if he loses in November; or about Trump’s answer to a TIME Magazine question about whether he expected violence after the 2024 election: “If we don’t win, you know, it depends,” Trump said.

Meanwhile, prominent Republicans hold that Trump—who shouted “fight” after he was shot at, and once advocated for shooting migrants in the legs to slow them down along the southern border—is trying to teach Democrats goodwill through his example.

“I think you’ve seen what President Trump has done right now: he hasn’t blamed anybody,” Kevin McCarthy, former Republican Speaker of the House, told Mother Jones Monday. “He’s actually putting a whole new speech together, talking about uniting the nation. I think that’s a very positive step.”

Vivek Ramaswamy, a 38-year-old entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate who later endorsed Trump, says Biden is sowing division by fear-mongering about Trump.

“I’ll take [Biden] at his word that he wants to unite the country and tone down the political rhetoric,” Ramaswamy says. “But his entire campaign message has centered around how Donald Trump is an existential threat to American democracy. And so either [Biden] is doubling down on something that he himself has said is the wrong direction to go, or he doesn’t have a campaign message left.”

“I think that there’s a strong case, to blame the media, to blame the Democrat machine,” adds Ramaswamy. “But I’m not focused on doing that. I would like for us to take the road less traveled, which is to focus on who we are and what we stand for. And I think those are ideals that unite all Americans. And I think the best way we’re going to save this country isn’t by calling on the other stand other side to play by different standards, but to hold ourselves to the standards we expect to hold the country.”

A couple hours after these interviews, Republican Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin took the stage at the convention and said Democrats were a threat to the country. In a speech he later said was added to the RNC teleprompter by mistake, Johnson described the Democratic Party’s policies as a “clear and present danger to America” and that Democrats were the party of “weaponized government.”