The Las Vegas Review-Journal was one of the few newspapers to endorse President Trump in both 2016 and 2020—but it's not endorsing his attempt to have last week's election results overturned. "The president does a disservice to his more rabid supporters by insisting that he would have won the Nov. 3 election absent voter fraud," the paper's conservative-learning editorial board writes. "That’s simply false." While Trump's campaign is "certainly within its rights to request recounts or challenge what it believes are improprieties," there is no evidence that "fraud cost Mr. Trump the election, no matter how much the president tweets the opposite and his supporters wish it so," the board writes. The board calls it an "insult to reason and logic to argue that isolated irregularities constitute proof of a grand national conspiracy."
The president "can keep fighting—and no doubt will," the board writes. "In the meantime, however, he has nothing to lose by cooperating with President-elect Biden’s transition team. Mr. Trump expected no less from the Obama administration in 2016 even as Hillary’s acolytes floated ways to manipulate the Electoral College vote." Biden, the board writes, "deserves the same consideration today regardless of how long the president seeks to delay the inevitable." Politico notes that the Review-Journal is owned by Sheldon Adelson, a casino magnate who donated $75 million to a pro-Trump super PAC in the final weeks of the campaign. In August, Trump reportedly alarmed Republicans by criticizing the megadonor for not doing enough to support him. (More Election 2020 stories.)