The Washington Examiner urged President Donald Trump to “move on” and accept defeat in the 2020 election in an editorial published Friday.
The conservative news outlet warned that Trump’s ongoing attempts to overturn President-elect Joe Biden’s victory could jeopardize the GOP candidates running for Georgia’s two Senate seats in January runoff elections, and thus cost the Republican Party its control of the Senate.
The site has called out Trump before, but often strikes a friendly tone on the president.
The editorial argues that Trump had the right to legally challenge alleged election “irregularities, mistakes, fraud, or all three,” but that Trump’s legal team has failed to prove the allegations and now “increasingly looks as though it is flinging mud to see what sticks, rather than pursuing a coherent course of litigation.”
The newspaper said Trump’s desperate bid for a second term will fail and is distracting “from the really important task of keeping the Senate in Republican hands.”
“If Trump wishes people to believe he has the good of the country and the legitimacy of its elections in mind, the president should concede that he lost and should do all he can to help his party win the two Senate battles in which it is still engaged,” it concluded.