During Wednesday’s presidential debate, GOP nominee Donald Trump, who has repeatedly claimed the election is “rigged” against him, made the dangerous pronouncement that he may not accept the official results of the election.
“I will tell you at the time,” he told moderator Chris Wallace. “I will leave you in suspense.”
Yet just before the debate, his running mate, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence (R), insisted that he would.
“I’ve said before that we’ll certainly accept the outcome of this election,” Pence told CNN in a pre-debate interview. (See the video above.)
Pence also affirmed this on Sunday, but just hours later, Trump tweeted the opposite, reiterating that “the election is absolutely being rigged.”
Trump and Pence are often not on the same page, and at times, have seemed to be running completely separate campaigns. Pence has tried to moderate or soften his running mate’s incendiary or offensive remarks, without much success.
During the vice presidential debate, he even attempted to deny statements that Trump most definitely said.
But after the debate, Pence backtracked and would not say definitively if Trump would accept the results.
“I think he has made a point that he’s resonating with millions of Americans that, quite frankly with all due respect, the media coverage in this presidential campaign is so one-sided,” he told NBC News. “He as the presidential candidate said tonight that he will take a wait-and-see approach. I have no doubt in my mind in the 20 days remaining in this campaign, we’ll continue to call for balanced coverage of this effort, and we are going to continue to call people all across the country to participate in the electoral process to ensure that we can be confident in the vote. If the vote is fair, I am confident that we’ll accept it.”
Pence also told CBS News that Trump “has every right, he has the prerogative to wait and see how the election comes out.”
This post has been updated with Pence’s post-debate remarks.
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.
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