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US President-elect Joe Biden asked Donald Trump to acknowledge defeat after the Electoral College vote.
The president-elect of the United States, Joe Biden, on Monday asked the outgoing president, Donald Trump, to acknowledge defeat in the November elections, shortly after the Electoral College confirmed the result of the elections.
“Respecting the will of the people is an essential part of our democracy. Even when we find those results difficult to accept. But that is the obligation of those who have assumed sworn duty to uphold the Constitution, ”Biden said in a speech.
The president-elect delivered his most direct speech to date condemning Trump’s efforts to delegitimize the election, minutes after the country’s westernmost state, Hawaii, closed the Electoral College vote confirming 306 delegates for Biden and 232 for Trump.
“306 electoral votes are the same that Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence received when they won in 2016. At the time, Trump called their advantage in the Electoral College a landslide victory,” Biden said.
“By their own standards,” he added, “these numbers (306-232) represented a clear victory then, and I respectfully suggest that they do now as well.”
Biden described his victory as “clear”, regretted that neither the counts in various states nor the judicial blows “have stopped the unfounded claims about the legitimacy of the results” and condemned the attempts to reverse the popular will by the outgoing president.
Fortunately, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected these attempts completely and immediately. The court sent a clear message to President Trump that they would not be part of an unprecedented assault on our democracy, “said Biden. For all this, the president-elect asked Trump to “turn the page.”
“In this battle for the soul of America, democracy has prevailed … The integrity of our elections remains intact. And now it is time to turn the page, to unite, to heal, “he said.
Biden has been confident since he was declared the winner of the elections on November 7 that Trump would end up admitting his defeat, but in his speech this Monday he put aside the conciliatory tone and asked the outgoing president to do it once. .
Normally, the Electoral College vote is a mere bureaucratic red tape, but this year it has grown in prominence because of Trump’s attempts to undermine the process.
The outgoing president, who will leave office on January 20, has filed several lawsuits in key states to allege, without evidence, that there was electoral fraud in the mail ballot, used by millions of Americans due to the pandemic, but most of them have been dismissed in court.
The end of Trump’s unprecedented legal campaign
Trump’s legal team, led by former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, brandished serious allegations of fraud and convoluted conspiracy theories to the media almost daily, but then failed to provide hard evidence before the courts, which dismissed their lawsuits almost every day. the cases.
Their outlandish arguments ranged from accusing the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez of electoral interference and ensuring that his allies had counted US votes in Spain and Germany; to claim that Trump won by millions of votes, but that many went to Biden because of software rigged by Democrats.
The coup de grace to that strategy was delivered last Friday by the Supreme Court, which rejected a lawsuit filed by the Republican leaders of Texas and backed by Trump to prevent Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin from endorsing their victory in the College on Monday. Electoral.
The main goal of Trump’s lawyers was always to turn around the result in those four key states, which the now president won in 2016, but which have now voted for Biden.
In addition to going to court, Trump lobbied state legislators in Michigan and Pennsylvania to interfere in the Electoral College process, and Republican leaders in Georgia to find ways to disqualify votes.
Tension in Georgia escalated to the point where at least one poll worker received death threats, and the state’s voting system implementation manager Gabriel Sterling publicly demanded that the president and his allies “stop” their baseless allegations. of fraud.
But Trump was sticking with a strategy that has been, above all, a public relations campaign to polish his brand of insurgent leader and enemy of the established power, and he promises to maintain it long after leaving the White House in January.
The tactic has already paid off: Only 24% of Americans who define themselves as Republicans accept the election result, according to an early December poll by broadcaster NPR and consultancy Marist.
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