THE WASHINGTON POST: Key Trump Cabinet members refuse to acknowledge Trump lost in 2020

Two of President Donald Trump’s top law enforcement nominees have been taking a new tack when talking about the 2020 presidential election: They’re not claiming Trump won that year, but they’re not saying he lost, either.

Joe Biden was “duly sworn in” after the 2020 election, Trump’s nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, told senators at her confirmation hearing.

“President Joe Biden’s election was certified, he was sworn in, and he served as the president of the United States,” Kash Patel, who has been tapped to lead the FBI, said at his confirmation hearing.

Neither would say that Biden defeated Trump, despite dozens of court rulings that upheld the results.

For years, Republicans have toyed with competing rhetorical approaches when discussing an election that Trump falsely insists he won. Russell Vought, Trump’s nominee for White House budget director, has taken a strident approach, telling the Senate in a written answer to questions that he believes the 2020 election was “rigged.” Bondi and Patel used their hearings to test a different strategy common among Republicans - one that avoids embracing lies about the election but doesn’t explicitly rule them out.

Democrats and other critics call their lack of frank talk dangerous, particularly because they want to hold positions in which they would have to tell the president difficult truths.

“It is abundantly clear who the voters chose to be the president in 2020. And for officials seeking these high-profile, important positions in government to not be able to acknowledge that truth speaks more to their fear of the person who’s appointing them as opposed to anything else,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson (D) said.

As the top election official in a swing state, Benson oversaw Trump’s loss in 2020 and his victory in 2024. She is now running for governor.

Aides to Bondi and Patel did not respond to requests for comment. Other Republicans called their testimony reasonable and said Democrats were making too much of their dodges on Trump’s 2020 loss.

“Politics is a funny thing,” said New Hampshire Secretary of State David Scanlan (R), who said he had no reason to doubt the 2020 results. “Some of those people have higher ambitions.”

Trump has long made views on the 2020 election a litmus test for Republicans. In job interviews, Trump advisers asked applicants for the Republican National Committee last year if they believed that the election was stolen. Over the last four years, Republicans have tried to assess the mood of their base and the public at large to decide whether to embrace false claims about the 2020 election, dodge the topic, or acknowledge that Biden won and move on.

The day after the election in 2020, Bondi traveled to Philadelphia as absentee ballots were being counted and the presidency was slipping away from Trump. Without evidence, she and Rudy Giuliani contended that “totally fraudulent” ballots could have been cast and discussed ways to challenge the results.

This month, at her Jan. 15 confirmation hearing, days before Trump was sworn in, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) tried to pin down Bondi on her views on the 2020 election.

“Are you prepared to say today, under oath, without reservation, that Donald Trump lost the presidential contest to Joe Biden in 2020?” Durbin asked.

“President Joe Biden is the president of the United States,” she answered. “He was duly sworn in, and he is the president of the United States. There was a peaceful transition of power. President Trump left office and was overwhelmingly elected in 2024.”

Durbin followed up by asking if she had any evidence that Biden didn’t get a majority of the electoral votes in 2020. Without providing specifics, Bondi said she saw “many things” that concerned her in Pennsylvania. “But do I accept the results? Of course I do,” she said.

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-California) asked if she could provide evidence of fraud or irregularities, and if she would retract her past comments about how the election was conducted in Pennsylvania. In a contentious exchange, he cut her off eight times when she tried to answer, demanding she respond with only a yes or a no.

When Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) asked Bondi who won the 2020 election, she responded, “Joe Biden is the president of the United States.”

Patel - who has spent years selling Trump merchandise and at times has claimed the 2020 election was rigged - wouldn’t say Trump won during his hearing last week. Instead, he said only that Biden’s election was certified and that he served as president.

Democrats did not directly ask other nominees in their hearings about the legitimacy of the 2020 election but expressed alarm about Vought’s views. In response to written questions, Vought told Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island), “I believe that the 2020 election was rigged.”

Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Oregon), in his opening statement at Vought’s hearing, called his description of the 2020 election troubling. “This may be essential for your loyalty test to the president, but it’s a willingness to manipulate and deceive Americans that certainly bothers me,” he said.

Vought did not address Merkley’s comment and was not directly asked about the 2020 results. A spokeswoman for Vought did not respond to a request for comment.

Bondi and Patel were not as brazen as Vought, but because of the positions they would hold, critics zeroed in on their reluctance to say Trump lost in 2020.

“We thought the election denial movement was defeated when the insurrection failed on January 6. In fact it only went into hibernation, and it has come back stronger than ever, including in the person of the nominees for the two most powerful law enforcement jobs in the country,” said Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who served as special counsel to the House Judiciary Committee for Trump’s first impeachment.

Wayne Williams, a Republican who served as Colorado’s secretary of state from 2015 to 2019, said Republicans remain concerned about how the 2020 election was conducted because so many rules were quickly changed during the covid-19 pandemic. “I think there are arguments that things were done in a way that was not appropriate,” he said.

“The way the founders framed our nation’s Constitution is the electoral college makes the decision that gets certified,” Williams said. “And that is how the president’s elected. And so, saying [Biden] was president and he was certified, I think covers the major elements of it.”

But Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes (D) said public officials shouldn’t have difficulty acknowledging that Trump lost in 2020 and won in 2024, even if they don’t like the results. Bondi’s and Patel’s unwillingness to do so is telling, he said.

“I think they know their boss,” Fontes said. “And they know that they’ve got to suck up to make him happy.”

- - -

Yvonne Wingett Sanchez contributed to this report.

© 2025 , The Washington Post