President Trump should not be expected to “cheerfully, immediately” accept the outcome of the contested 2020 race and is “100 percent within his rights” to challenge the results, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in a speech from the Senate floor on Monday.
In his first remarks since Joe Biden was declared the winner of the presidential election based on projections, McConnell defended Trump’s use of litigation to challenge vote counts in various states and blasted Democrats like Hillary Clinton for claiming Trump would try to steal the election.
“Let’s not have any lectures, no lectures, about how the president should immediately, cheerfully accept preliminary election results from the same characters who just spent four years refusing to accept the validity of the last election and who insinuated that this one would be illegitimate too if they lost again — only if they lost,” said McConnell.
“The people who push this hysteria could not have any more egg on their faces than they do right now,” McConnell said of charges that foreign countries would interfere in the presidential election, highlighting the hundreds of millions that had been spent to fortify election security.
“The president has every right to look into allegations and to request recounts under the law and notably the Constitution gives no role in this process to wealthy media corporations,” he said.
“The projections and commentary of the press do not get veto power over the legal rights of any citizen, including the President of the United States,” he went on.
“Our institutions are actually built for this,” McConnell said. “We have the system in place to consider concerns and President Trump is 100 percent within his rights to look into allegations of irregularities and weigh his legal options.”
WIBC host Tony Katz addressed McConnell’s comments in today’s Popcorn Moment.
