Donald Trump has lately been going back and forth between saying he “lost by this much” and saying he didn’t lose at all. The fact that he’s begun including the framing of an actual loss is a severe departure from his four-year insistence that the 2020 election was “rigged” or fraudulent.

To watch recent videos of Trump confessing that the Biden campaign won, even “by a little whisker,” sent shudders down the spines of every MAGA supporter who’s spent every waking moment since November of 2020 shouting that Trump actually won.

Plain as day, however, the former president said it:

Trump just admitted he lost the 2020 election again. I’m laughing at all you MAGAs who are currently in jail for J6 because of Trump’s lies! 🤣🤣🤣pic.twitter.com/a1822Sjm3i

— Alex Cole (@acnewsitics) September 25, 2024

That’s from September, so it’s not like he said it yesterday. Heck, he may have already forgotten that he ever said it at all, if he hadn’t done so on so many occasions recently.

But with that in mind, it makes what he said yesterday at an event in Lititz, Pennsylvania even more terrifying than it might have been otherwise.

Trump was railing about the poll that came out in Iowa — the nearly infallible Selzer poll in the Des Moines Register that’s called all but the least significant races correctly — which has him suddenly down by three points in the Hawkeye State.

“Joni Ernst called me, everyone’s called me, they said, you’re killing it, Iowa,” Trump said. “But they came up, they just announced a fake poll, hey, think of it, right before the election that I’m three points down.”

His ranting went on for some time as he prepped the crowd for the inevitable repeat of last time, where he says he won no matter the outcome:

Our country is a crooked country, okay? It’s a crooked country, and we’re gonna make it straight… They wanna put you in jail because you wanna make it straight. They cheat on elections, and you call them on it, and they wanna put you in jail.

We had the best economy ever. We had the wall. We had everything. I won’t pull down my world’s favorite chart, because I don’t wanna waste a lot of your time, but my world’s favorite chart, done by the Border Patrol, it said we had the safest border in the history of our country the day that I left.

And then he dropped the bomb.

“I shouldn’t have left,” Trump said. “I mean, honestly, because we did so, we did so well.”

Trump says he “shouldn’t have left” the White House after the 2020 election: “I shouldn’t have left. I mean, honestly” pic.twitter.com/QNCkOiHNE7

— Kamala HQ (@KamalaHQ) November 3, 2024

That’s where it gets scary. Because if Trump had gone along with what he’s historically been saying during the campaign, that he didn’t lose, then this would just be him repeating himself.

But now that he’s allowed for the possibility that he actually may have been beaten, hearing him STILL say that he “shouldn’t have left” puts things in an entirely different light. Because that means he thinks he should have refused to leave, no matter the outcome.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I would love to have seen Trump get marched out of the White House by a Secret Service that doesn’t take too kindly to trespassers. And that’s exactly what he would’ve become instantly when Joe Biden was sworn in as the new president.

“Please step off the president’s plane, Mr. Nixon,” I imagine they said when Gerald Ford was sworn in while Tricky Dick was in the air after he resigned.

But I honestly believe that saying he shouldn’t have vacated the White House even after admitting multiple times that he lost the election might be a glimpse into what the future might hold. Donald Trump doesn’t even know WHO’S in power right now, but he doesn’t want to give up the power that he doesn’t yet hold.

For the record, the president is still Joe “Beat Him By A 7-Million-Vote-Whisker” Biden, not Kamala Harris. I know Trump would like for people the believe that Kamala is currently the president as he’s been pretending in his campaign this whole time. That way, everything he claims is wrong can be blamed on her and therefore seen as a reason to vote for him instead.

The problem for him is that there’s not much wrong. GDP is growing, the stock market is at record highs, inflation has dropped by more than two-thirds in just 2 years following a pandemic, the crime rate is significantly lower than it was during his tenure, and things are finally looking up after his disastrous presidency.

In other words, it took almost the whole 4 years, but Joe fixed most of what Trump ruined.

And he just told America he wishes he’d kicked and screamed in the hallways of the White House so he could keep rage-tweeting from the Oval Office bathroom.

Get to the polls, Americans. You know what to do.