A ranking member of the Democratic Party, Bernie Sanders, has said Joe Biden will be sworn into office, whether President Donald Trump concedes or not and will leave the White House either voluntary or forcefully.
Trump, who has consistently rejected Biden’s victory, has filed multiple lawsuits to challenge his rival’s victory.
Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, had earlier said his client will not concede defeat.
But speaking with CNN after Biden was projected the 46th US president, Sanders, whose withdrawal from the presidential race paved way for the president-elect to clinch the ticket of the Democratic Party, said Trump’s refusal to concede defeat was inconsequential.
The First lady Melania Trump has also joined the growing chorus of president Trump inner circle, advising him the time has come for him to accept the loss, a source familiar with the converstions told CNN.
Though she has not publicly commented on the elections, privately Melania Trump has weighed in with her opinion.
Also, US Senator, Chris Murphy, has said President Donald Trump will leave the White House either voluntary or forcefully if he loses the presidential election.
Speaking to NOWTHIS, the US Senator said there was no legal requirement for the President to concede.
Murphy said, “Well, there is no legal requirement for Donald Trump to concede. I have been in, you know, probably more than one election in my life where my opponent was just so upset and sort of so full of sour grapes that they refused to concede.
“You know Speaker Pelosi said on November 3 that the presidential thing to do if you lose is to concede. But Donald Trump hasn’t done a single something presidential in the last four years, so I don’t expect him to concede, and I don’t need him to concede defeat.
“If he loses this election, he is going to leave White House, either voluntarily or with a little bit of help.”
However, history is about to repeat itself in US transitional process as President Donald Trump has given every indication that he won’t accept the result as fair even though Joe Biden has secured enough votes to become president-elect of the United States, Trump also has refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power.
U.S. history has seen a handful of bitterly contested elections, most recently in 2000, when Democrat Al Gore called Republican George W. Bush to concede in the early hours after election night—only to call back and retract his concession when the race unexpectedly tightened up. While their first conversation was congenial, the second was tense, with Gore famously telling Bush, “You don’t have to get snippy about this.”
No presidential candidate has ever refused to concede defeat once all the votes were counted and legal challenges resolved.
For the country’s first hundred years or so, conceding a race wasn’t part of the process at all. Here’s how the loser’s concession went from nonexistent to an essential custom that all candidates have observed—albeit some less graciously than others.
The peaceful transfer of power has been a norm since 1800, when the country’s second president John Adams became the first to lose his reelection bid refusing to hand over office to his main rival at the 1800 election Thomas Jefferson and quietly left Washington, D.C., on an early morning stagecoach to avoid attending his successor Thomas Jefferson’s inauguration.
Some early presidential candidates did send congratulatory letters to their opponents, says John R. Vile, dean of political science at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, who has written about the history of concession speeches. But formal concessions didn’t become an election custom until 1896, when Republican William McKinley defeated Democrat William Jennings Bryan.
In his account of the campaign in a later memoir, Bryan wrote that he began to resign himself to the loss by 11 p.m. on election night—a resignation that grew in the subsequent days as states completed counting ballots. On Thursday evening, Bryan learned that his loss was certain and immediately sent a telegram to McKinley, offering his congratulations and stating: “We have submitted the issue to the American people and their will is law.”
With that, a custom was born—much to Bryan’s own bewilderment as he considered it to be simply the courteous thing to do. “This exchange of messages was much commented upon at the time, though why it should be considered extraordinary I do not know,” Bryan wrote. “We were not fighting each other, but stood as the representatives of different political ideas, between which the people were to choose.”
Ever since, losing candidates have conceded to their opponents—even sitting presidents. In 1912, for example, Republican President William Howard Taft conceded to Democrat Woodrow Wilson at 11 p.m. on election night, while in 1932 Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover telegraphed his congratulations to Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt the day after the New York governor unseated him, and Hoover promised to dedicate himself “to every possible helpful effort.”
In 1960, Republican Vice President Nixon sealed his own loss to Democrat John F. Kennedy when, in his role as president of the Senate, he counted and confirmed the electoral votes. Even though Hawaii had sent two sets of votes after its results had been briefly contested, Nixon asked for, and received, unanimous consent to count the state for his opponent since they would not have changed the results of the election. “I don’t think we could have a more eloquent example of the stability of our constitutional system and the proud tradition of the American people of developing, respecting, and honoring institutions,” even when one loses, Vile says.
“When it comes down to it, it’s not the Army or the Navy that keeps the United States together,” Vile says. “It’s the notion that we are bound together by certain great principles and that our similarities are more binding than our differences are.”
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