Trump waffles on ballot result

President has ‘to see’ whether he’ll accept voters’ verdict

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is refusing to publicly commit to accepting the results of the upcoming election, recalling a similar threat he made weeks before the 2016 vote, as he scoffs at polls showing him lagging behind Democrat Joe Biden.

Trump said it’s too early to make such an ironclad guarantee.

“I have to see. Look … I have to see,” Trump told moderator Chris Wallace during a wide-ranging interview on “Fox News Sunday.” “No, I’m not going to just say yes. I’m not going to say no, and I didn’t last time, either.”

The Biden campaign responded: “The American people will decide this election. And the United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House.”

Trump also hammered the Pentagon brass for favoring a renaming of bases that honor Confederate military leaders, a drive for change spurred by the national debate about race after George Floyd’s death.

“I don’t care what the military says,” the commander in chief said.

The president described the nation’s top infectious diseases expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, as a “a little bit of an alarmist” about the coronavirus pandemic, and Trump stuck to what he said back in February: that the virus is “going to disappear.”

On Fox, he said, “I’ll be right eventually.”

Trump has seen his presidential popularity erode over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic and in the aftermath of nationwide protests centered on racial injustice that erupted after Floyd’s death in Minneapolis nearly two months ago.

Trump contends that a series of polls that show his popularity plummeting and Biden holding an advantage are faulty. He believes that Republican voters are underrepresented in such surveys.

“First of all, I’m not losing, because those are fake polls,” Trump said in the taped interview, which aired Sunday. “They were fake in 2016, and now they’re even more fake. The polls were much worse in 2016.”

Among the issues discussed was the push for wholesale changes in policing that has swept across the nation. Trump said he could understand why Black Americans are upset about how police use force disproportionately against them.

“Ofcourseido.ofcourseido,”the president said, adding that “whites are also killed, too.”