Former President Donald Trump publicly acknowledged that he did not win the 2020 presidential election, telling podcaster Lex Fridman that he "lost by a whisker."

Fridman asked the Republican nominee about his expectations for his debate next week against Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, in a podcast episode released Tuesday.

Trump initially answered, "I've done a lot of debating ... I've done well with debates," before embarking on a tangent about the number of votes he received in 2020, saying: "I became president. Then the second time I got millions more votes than I got the first time."

"I was told if I got 63 million, which is what I got the first time, 'You would win. You can't not win.' And I got millions more votes than that and lost by a whisker," Trump added.

Trump received about 74 million votes nationally in 2020, compared to 81 million for Joe Biden.

His admission is a departure from his usual rhetoric about the 2020 presidential election results, which he often claims were "rigged."

If Kamala Harris were as awful as Trump claims, it should be easy for him to come up with plenty of reality-based attacks.

He's heavily relying instead on made-up nonsense, which is proving the opposite of the intended point.

In theory, the Republican’s 2024 campaign team could invest heavily in advertising intended to make the GOP nominee more popular, but in practice, those involved in the process realize that it’s far too late for that. As a Washington Post report summarized on Labor Day, “With little chance of improving Trump’s standing, Trump’s advisers see the only option as damaging [Vice President Kamala Harris’ standing].”

As campaign strategies go, this one isn’t complicated: If the 2024 race comes down to whether the electorate likes the former president or not, he’ll lose. Left with few options, Team Trump believes it has no choice but to try to tear down the Democratic nominee......

But Trump has been especially interested of late in the work the vice president did while she was still a student. At a conservative event late last week, the GOP candidate declared:

“She also said, ‘I worked at McDonald’s.’ Turned out she didn’t work at McDonald’s. Anybody see that? After an exhaustive study that took about 20 minutes, they found out she never worked there. So, you know, a lot of fake stuff going on.”

His audience apparently found this amusing, as a video clip showed.

https://x.com/Acyn/status/1829689678435594425

A day later, he published an item to his social media platform that read, “Kamala said she worked at McDonalds — She never did. Lie!” Two days later, Trump once again returned to the subject, insisting that Harris “never worked at McDonalds.”

Harris really did work at McDonald's. She didn’t include this on her resume when she sought a job at the Alameda County district attorney’s office in 1987 because it didn’t seem especially relevant to the position, but it doesn’t change the fact that she made French fries and worked a register, just like plenty of other young people nationwide.

Or put another way, Trump lied about Harris lying.

But stepping back, the broader circumstances should probably give Republicans pause. The Democratic nominee has been involved in public service for decades, working as a prosecutor, a state attorney general, a U.S. senator, and a vice president. If the GOP candidate and his team are eager to scrutinize her record, there should be plenty of accurate things to choose from.

So why is it that Trump has relied so heavily on made-up nonsense? If Harris is as bad as her partisan critics claim, why can’t Trump simply tell the truth?

As JD Vance’s record of related to American families gets worse, a question hangs overhead:

Did Team Trump actually vet this guy before adding him to the Republican ticket?

But as my MSNBC colleague Clarissa-Jan Lim explained, “new reporting on Vance’s stamp of approval for a 2017 document from the Heritage Foundation could lead to more backlash.”

The document in question is the “Index of Culture and Opportunity” put together by the Heritage Foundation to analyze cultural and economic trends from a conservative perspective. Vance ... wrote an introduction for the report, praising it for “shed[ding] needed light on our country’s most difficult and intractable problems.” And as The New York Times has pointed out, he was also the keynote speaker at the release of the report.

That same New York Times report added that the Heritage Foundation document “proposed a sweeping conservative agenda to restrict sexual and reproductive freedoms and remake American families.”

In a series of 29 separate essays, conservative commentators, policy experts, community leaders and Christian clergy members opposed the spread of in vitro fertilization and other fertility treatments, describing those treatments as harmful to women. They praised the rapidly expanding number of state laws restricting abortion rights and access, saying that the procedure should become “unthinkable” in America. And they cited hunger as a “great motivation” for Americans to find work.

For its part, the Trump/Vance campaign told MSNBC in a statement, “Senator Vance has long made clear that he supports IVF and does not agree with every opinion in this seven-year-old report, which features a range of unique views from dozens of conservative thinkers. He had no role in editing the report and outside of his own contribution, did not have any input on the commentary throughout. It’s bizarre that the New York Times wrote an entire piece attacking Senator Vance for the views of other individuals.”......

In theory, the Trump campaign’s research team was responsible for combing through potential vice presidential nominees’ backgrounds, looking for potential trouble areas. In practice, that leads to a couple of possibilities.

The first is that Team Trump didn’t invest much time or effort into examining Vance’s far-right ideas related to American families. The second is that members of Team Trump conducted a thorough vetting process, learned about Vance’s record and saw nothing they disagreed with.

So, which is it?

And so, as my MSNBC colleague Clarissa-Jan Lim noted, the GOP candidate reversed course a day later.

Donald Trump said on Friday he will vote against Florida’s abortion rights ballot amendment after all, as he tries to stem the backlash from anti-abortion Republicans for having suggested earlier that he might support the measure in November.

There was a degree of irony to the circumstances: One of Trump’s principal talking points last week was accusing Vice President Kamala Harris of “flip-flopping.” It was against this backdrop that the GOP nominee struggled — again — to keep his story straight on a key issue for millions of voters.

Complicating matters, Trump said exactly what Democrats wanted him to say.

“Donald Trump just made his position on abortion very clear: He will vote to uphold an abortion ban so extreme it applies before many women even know they are pregnant,” Harris said in a written statement. “Trump proudly brags about the role that he played in overturning Roe v. Wade and said there should be punishment for women who have an abortion. So, of course he thinks it’s a ‘beautiful thing’ that women in Florida and across the country are being turned away from emergency rooms, face life-threatening situations, and are forced to travel hundreds of miles for the care they need.”

Let’s not forget that Trump, as part of his 2024 candidacy, has insisted that if he returns to the White House, he won’t support an abortion ban. But it’s awfully tough for a candidate to say he opposes abortion bans while announcing his support for an abortion ban.

What’s more, this offers Democrats another opportunity to tell the electorate that when push comes to shove, Trump will back down under pressure from the far-right and do what conservatives tell him to do.

During an interview with podcaster Lex Fridman, Donald Trump claimed that he really only lost the 2020 election "by a whisker." While he has made comments about losing the election a handful of times over the last four years, his recent admission is drawing increased attention.

In the interview, Trump repeated false claims that the 2020 election “was a fraud” but then confessed he lost the race.

"I was told if I got 63 million, which is what I got the first time, you would win. You can't not win. And I got millions of more votes than that and lost by a whisker," Trump said. He made the same comment to the Moms for Liberty group in Washington, D.C., on Friday night.

Gen Z activist Harry Sisson, who boasts over 261,000 followers, caught that admission last week, noting that Trump "conned all of these MAGA lunatics into believing his lies just for him to admit it wasn't stolen. HA!"

In fact, the 2020 election saw a record turnout with 81,284,666 votes for Democratic candidate Joe Biden. Trump got over five million fewer votes. It is the equivalent of the entire state of South Carolina......

Another influencer, John Collins, with over 218,000 followers, pointed out the quote saying Trump is "finally accepting reality."

"This Trump 'I lost by a whisker' comment on Lex Friedman wasn't a slip. He's said it three times in the past week. Seems like part of a pattern, like his abortion flip, of trying (erratically and unconvincingly) to walk away from his least popular positions," explained former Obama campaign alum Ravi Gupta.

Fox News personalities cried foul after reports said President Joe Biden would warn of Russian interference in U.S. elections.

On Wednesday, Fox News host Harris Faulkner confirmed that Biden intended to address Russia's "sustained effort" to influence the 2024 presidential election by using state-run media.

"Why is that suddenly a concern now?" Faulkner complained to Fox News contributor Steve Hilton.

"That's the truth about all of this in this world that we live in today, which is you have Iran doing this, you have China doing this, and frankly, we do it to other countries as well," Hilton replied, dismissing the concerns.

Hilton insisted that the Biden-Harris administration was making the announcement "because they know that plays to their base."....

Instead of focusing on Russia, Hilton cast doubt on American law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

"Because of the way that they've behaved, the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Justice, all these people over the years, we now know, totally biased and in the tank and trying to both stop Trump from being elected and once he was elected to undermine his administration," he said. "That means that we no longer trust them."

Evidently, some congressional Democrats are thinking along the same lines. The Washington Post reported:

Democratic leaders on the House Oversight Committee released a letter Tuesday asking former president Donald Trump if he ever illegally received money from the government of Egypt, and whether money from Cairo played a role in a $10 million infusion into his 2016 run for president.

According to the Post’s reporting, two leading House Democrats — Maryland’s Jamie Raskin, the ranking Democrat on the Oversight panel, and California’s Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on its subcommittee for national security, the border and foreign affairs — are now pressing the former president for answers.

“Surely you would agree that the American people deserve to know whether a former president — and a current candidate for president — took an illegal campaign contribution from a brutal foreign dictator,” the congressmen’s letter reads. “Accordingly, we request that you immediately provide the Committee with information and documents necessary to assure the Committee and the American public that you never, directly or indirectly, politically or personally, received any fund from the Egyptian president or government.”......

Soon after, Egypt’s president became one of Trump’s first foreign guests at the White House — a generous diplomatic gesture — and the then-American president ultimately released over $1 billion in military aid for Egypt.

U.S. investigators never proved that the cash from that Egyptian bank went to Trump. That would’ve required access to more of Trump’s financial records, which they didn’t get.

Why not? According to the Post, because then-Attorney General Bill Barr intervened to prevent FBI agents from subpoenaing Trump’s financial records. What’s more, Barr removed the relevant prosecutor — and her replacement — until the controversial A.G. finally arrived at a prosecutor who shut down the investigation altogether.

Trump has denied wrongdoing, though as Rachel Maddow Show viewers might recall, he has the wherewithal to simply shut down all questions by releasing relevant financial records — either to the public or to congressional investigators. To date, that hasn’t happened.

A few months ago, Trump falsely accused President Joe Biden of “receiving money, for no apparent reason, from foreign countries.” Given this, it would appear that the former president shouldn’t be too surprised to receive some related questions from his recent past.

PITTSBURGH (The Borowitz Report)—Calling the measure “long overdue,” JD Vance on Wednesday proposed posting the Ten Commandments inside every American uterus.

“Thanks to the woke mob, American kids today are being exposed to a godless society,” Vance alleged. “Having access to the Ten Commandments in utero will get them started on the right path.”

As for the logistical challenges inherent in his proposal, Vance said, “If we can develop the technology to keep our ‘precious’ cats free of fleas, I think we can get the word of God into 170 million uteri.”

“Communists like Kamala Harris and Tim Walz don’t want prayer in school,” he added. “If Donald Trump is president, we’re going to have prayer in womb.”