Bernie Sanders 'outraged' at Trump's refusal to concede election to Joe Biden: 'Nobody has ever seen this'
Vermont Senator and former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders (D-VT) did not hold back when he was asked on Wednesday, November 11, what his thoughts were on the fact that even after days of President-elect Joe Biden being declared the projected winner of the 2020 election, President Donald Trump not only refused to concede but cried voter fraud and kept claiming that the race was "stolen" from him.
Sanders voiced his anger after he sat down for a one-on-one virtual interview with CNN's Wolf Blitzer. When the legendary journalist asked him, "What's your reaction to what's going on?" the senator explained why he thought Trump's refusal to concede the race was an "outrage."
"It is outrage. Look people lose close elections. Hillary Clinton lost a close election. Other people have lost close elections. And what you do in America historically is say, 'Hey, I fought as hard as I could. I wanna thank my supporters. I congratulate the winner. Let's go forward with the transition. We all love our country and we all want the best for America.' What he is doing right now is delegitimizing our electoral process and American democracy. What he is saying to his supporters, 'We really didn't lose the election, yeah maybe they got five million more votes than we got nationally, we really didn't lose it. It's fraud, fraud, fraud.' And millions of people are gonna believe that. That is an outrage.
Blitzer then asked the longest-serving independent in US congressional history, "Have you ever seen anything like this before?" he did not hesitate in saying that no losing presidential nominee had ever not conceded the race to the winner despite there being no laid in place to ensure the tradition is carried out.
"No. It's not that I have not seen, nobody has ever seen this. This really is an outrage. And this is why I work so hard and the progressive community work so hard in this election. Because what we knew what this election was about - you know it's not just climate change or criminal justice reform or the economy. It is whether or not we continue to have a president, Donald Trump, who is a pathological liar, who really is trying to move this country beyond the rule of law. And that is something that we cannot accept. Thank god, we were able to defeat him," Sanders said.
MEAWW previously reported that after Trump tried to prematurely declare victory despite many of the battleground states still not having finished counting all the votes, including those cast via mail, a clip of a prediction made by Sanders went viral on Twitter in which he seemed to accurately claim that POTUS would make such a statement if results were close. The clip in question was from an interview Sanders did with comedian Jimmy Fallon on October 23, on 'The Tonight Show.'
During the October interview, Sanders told Fallon: "You're going to have a situation, I suspect, in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, other states, where they are going to be receiving huge amounts of mail-in ballots. They're not able—for bad reasons—to begin processing those ballots until Election Day or maybe when the polls close. That means you're going to have states dealing with perhaps millions of mail-in ballots."
"It could well be [...] that at 10 o'clock on election night, Trump is winning in Michigan, he's winning in Pennsylvania, he's winning in Wisconsin and he gets on the television and he says: 'Thank you, Americans, for re-electing me. It's all over. Have a good day.' But then the next day, and the day following, all of those mail-in ballots start getting counted and it turns out that Biden has won those states. At which point Trump says: 'See? I told you the whole thing was fraudulent. I told you those mail-in ballots were crooked. And, you know, we're not going to leave office,'" Sanders added.