With a lot of national attention on the debate held earlier this week in Georgia between Donald Trump and incumbent President Joe Biden as the two approach an expected electoral rematch later this year, Richard Stengel — whose career includes time as a leading official at the State Department during Barack Obama’s presidency — is speaking out.

“The single most important fact from the debate is that one candidate would not pledge to abide by the result of the election. That by itself is disqualifying,” said Stengel as some focused instead in large part on Biden’s “performance.”

Though topics covered by the moderators were quite wide-ranging, Trump was, in fact, eventually asked about whether he would accept the results of this year’s election no matter who wins, and he answered with caveats.

“President Trump, the question was, will you accept the results of the election regardless of who wins? Yes or no, please?” said moderator Dana Bash.

“If it’s a fair and legal and good election – absolutely,” said the former president, although there are no real-world indications of current, systematic problems with election security and integrity in the United States, particularly its presidential face-offs. “I would have much rather accepted these but the fraud and everything else was ridiculous that if you want, we’ll have a news conference on it in a week or we’ll have another one of these on – in a week. But I will absolutely – there’s nothing I’d rather do.”

Trump’s seemingly established, though, that his own assessment of whether an election is “fair” and “legal” substantially differs from the assessments of figures across layers of government, many of whom were required to sign off on various caches of results from the 2020 presidential race before Biden ever became president. Investigators widely accepted as credible at the state and federal levels who examined questions from the 2020 presidential race never substantiated any claims of widespread fraud.