Donald Trump 'Afraid of Losing': Former RNC Chair

Former Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman Michael Steele said Saturday morning that Donald Trump is "afraid of losing" this year's election as he reacted to comments made by the former president in a recent Time magazine article.

Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee in the 2024 presidential election, told Time that he may not be willing to accept the results of November's general election if he loses to Democratic President Joe Biden.

While campaigning in Wisconsin on Wednesday, Trump said of the results of the 2024 election in an interview with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, "If everything's honest, I'll gladly accept the results. I don't change on that. If it's not, you have to fight for the right of the country."

He added: "But if everything's honest, which we anticipate it will be—a lot of changes have been made over the last few years—but if everything's honest, I will absolutely accept the results."

These comments prompted Steele, a co-host of MSNBC's The Weekend, to doubt the former president's motives in questioning the integrity of U.S. elections.

"The idea that you think, that of all of the elections we've had in the history of this country, that your election is the least honest and the most corrupt, it just shows the fallacy of what the man is laying out there," Steele said.

He added: "Donald Trump is afraid of losing because it strikes at the core of the thing that is most important to him, and that is his ego. And he doesn't want to do the work to actually win. He wants to goad and cajole and bully people into believing something about our system because he is too weak of a man to actually go out and campaign like any other normal candidate who would go out and campaign."

When reached via email on Saturday afternoon, Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung told Newsweek in response to Steele's comments, "Never Trumpers suffer from a severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that they would be OK with the potential for dishonest elections and threats to Democracy."

During his interview with the Journal Sentinel, the former president claimed that he won Wisconsin in 2020, despite there being no evidence of this. Biden beat Trump in Wisconsin by over 20,000 votes.

"If you go back and look at all of the things that had been found out, it showed that I won the election in Wisconsin," Trump said. "It also showed I won the election in other locations."

Steele, chair of the RNC from 2009 to 2011, addressed the MSNBC panel and camera as he remarked Saturday about the former president.

"That is your truth, Donald Trump," he said. "And what you are trying to do is game the system, as he did in 2016 and 2020, to say that, 'If I don't win, the system is corrupt.' No, Donald Trump, if you don't win it's because more people voted against you than for you and our electoral system confirms that."

When asked earlier this week by Newsweek how Trump will determine if the 2024 election is honest given that he continues to claim that Biden's 2020 election win was stolen due to widespread voter fraud despite there being no evidence of such a claim, Cheung asked over email: "So is your argument that people should accept dishonest elections?"

When probed further, Cheung simply wrote: "Dishonest elections are bad."

Meanwhile, voters believe that Trump and Biden are running almost equally good 2024 campaigns, according to a new poll.

A Redfield & Wilton Strategies survey of 1,500 eligible voters, conducted exclusively for Newsweek, found that 37 percent think Trump is currently running the best campaign, compared to 36 percent who think Biden is.

The results arrive despite Trump currently having his campaign schedule severely hindered as he must appear in court most weekdays in New York as part of his criminal hush money trial.

Trump became the first former president in U.S. history to stand trial in a criminal case last month. Following an investigation by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's office, Trump was indicted in March 2023 on 34 charges of allegedly falsifying business records relating to hush money payments that were made to adult film star Stormy Daniels during his 2016 presidential campaign. Daniels alleges she had an affair with Trump in 2006, which he has denied. The former president has pleaded not guilty to all charges and said the case against him is politically motivated.

In addition, the former president was indicted last year by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) for his role in allegedly trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the run-up to the events of the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot by his supporters. Trump was also indicted last year in Georgia's Fulton County for allegedly conspiring to overturn Biden's 2020 election win in the state. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges in those cases as well.

Update 5/4/24, 3:07 p.m. ET: This article has been updated with comment from Cheung.