The conservative editorial magazine The National Review Monday denounced Donald Trump’s “petulant refusal” to accept the results of the presidential election and his continued spread of election disinformation as being “disgraceful.”
“There are legitimate issues to consider after the 2020 vote about the security of mail-in ballots and the process of counting votes (some jurisdictions, bizarrely, take weeks to complete their initial count), but make no mistake: The chief driver of the post-election contention of the past several weeks is the petulant refusal of one man to accept the verdict of the American people,” the editorial said. “The Trump team (and much of the GOP) is working backwards, desperately trying to find something, anything to support the president’s aggrieved feelings, rather than objectively considering the evidence and reacting as warranted.”
“Almost nothing that the Trump team has alleged has withstood the slightest scrutiny. In particular, it’s hard to find much that is remotely true in the president’s Twitter feed these days,” it continued. “Flawed and dishonest assertions like this pollute the public discourse and mislead good people who make the mistake of believing things said by the president of the United States.”
On Monday, Trump continued to spread baseless accusations of election fraud on his Twitter account and has still not conceded the election to Joe Biden. Of the dozens of lawsuits the Trump campaign has filed, the majority have been denied, dismissed or withdrawn.
This isn’t the first time Trump has been criticized by the magazine founded in 1955 by author William F. Buckley to stimulate the conservative movement. In January 2015, it published an article titled “Against Trump,” saying, “Some conservatives have made it their business to make excuses for Trump and duly get pats on the head from him. Count us out. Donald Trump is a menace to American conservatism who would take the work of generations and trample it underfoot in behalf of a populism as heedless and crude as the Donald himself.”