Getty/Drew Angerer Eric Trump at the 2020 Republican National Convention.
Eric Trump, President Donald Trump‘s 36-year-old son and campaign surrogate, told local reporters on Thursday, September 24, that the president will concede the election to Joe Biden “if he got blown out of the water.”
Eric’s comments, made to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, appear to contradict Trump’s recent public statements in which he has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, should Biden defeat him in November.
Dozens of Democratic lawmakers, as well as journalists, have called the president’s comments dangerous. Senator Elizabeth Warren on Thursday said President Trump was “flirting with treason,” AOL reported
Here’s what you need to know:
Eric Trump Repeated His Father’s Claims About Potential Fraud, But Said the President Would Concede If Biden Won a Blowout
GettyDon Jr, Eric, and Ivanka Trump
Eric Trump held a campaign rally Thursday evening at a winery in Pahrump, Nevada, and took questions just before the event from the Review-Journal.
When asked about Trump’s controversial statement that “We’re going to have to see what happens” after the election, as well as his suggestion that throwing away all mail-in ballots would ensure him a second term, Eric restated his father’s position, then backed off a bit.
“I think my father’s saying the same thing: I’ll have to look at what happens,” Eric told the Review-Journal, pointing to a recent interview in which Hillary Clinton said Biden should not concede to Trump no matter what.
“I think my father’s just saying listen, if he got blown out of the water, of course he’d concede,” Eric added. “If he thought there was massive fraud, then he’d go and try and address that.”
President Trump has recently said that the number of mail-in ballots this election will amount to “fraud and abuse that will be an embarrassment to our country,” despite testimony to the contrary from FBI Director Christopher Wray.
The Senate on Thursday Unanimously Passed a Resolution Committing to the Peaceful Transfer of Power
Following Trump’s comments on the November election results, Democratic West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin introduced a resolution affirming the Senate’s dedication to a peaceful transfer of power and specifically calling out any potential “disruptions by the president.”
You can read the resolution in full here.
On the Senate floor, Manchin called it a “shame” that the resolution even needed to be brought to a vote and said that he and senators of both parties were disturbed by Trump’s comments. He added:
What we are doing with this resolution is saying that basically the bedrock of democracy is the orderly and peaceful transfer of power when the president transitions out. It should not be a question. We’re in the most difficult times right now, and for the President to even address the subject of maybe not knowing if he would accept [the election results] or not is beyond all of our comprehension that this could ever happen in America.
The resolution passed unanimously.
Fundamental to democracy is the peaceful transition of power; without that, there is Belarus. Any suggestion that a president might not respect this Constitutional guarantee is both unthinkable and unacceptable.
Utah Republican Senator Mitt Romney also said on Twitter the night before that the idea that Trump wouldn’t commit to conceding the election should he lose was “unthinkable and unacceptable.”
The winner of the November 3rd election will be inaugurated on January 20th. There will be an orderly transition just as there has been every four years since 1792.
Meanwhile Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell promised that the transition would be “orderly … just as there has been every four years since 1792.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Heavy.
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