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Democratic nominee Joe Biden caught up with Donald Trump in Georgia, eliminating the US president’s initial lead of hundreds of thousands of votes in the presidential election.
Biden had trimmed Trump’s lead in Pennsylvania by a few thousand more votes, as the president had raged in a monologue from the White House meeting room earlier, around 7 p.m.: “If legal votes count , I win easily, “he said. adding later, re-airing an old but unfounded grievance, “they are trying to steal an election” and that there was an effort underway to “rig” the election. He made these claims without presenting any evidence.
Daniel Dale, the CNN fact-checker, was appalled. “I have read or seen all of Trump’s speeches since 2016. This is the most dishonest speech he has ever given.”
Even close Republican allies were publicly uncomfortable with the US president’s wild accusations. Chris Christie, the former Republican governor of New Jersey who had helped Trump prepare for his presidential debates, asked the president to provide evidence.
“Keep the faith folks,” Biden tweeted shortly after the president ended his angry speech that was filled with unproven allegations of voter fraud and displayed a staggering lack of understanding of the US electoral process.
Mysteriously, he had said, his first tracks in some states disappeared in one stage. Those were due to absentee ballots, which were later counted. However, it could have been a deliberate tactic to muddy the waters.
The race shifted incrementally and steadily in Biden’s direction throughout Thursday, vote count day 2. The former vice president continued to rack up votes in Pennsylvania and Georgia, the former a well-known battlefield state and the latter a solidly Republican state that hasn’t voted Democrats in a presidential election since 1992, when Bill Clinton won it in three ways. .
As President Trump’s tracks collapsed in these two states, he won at Biden in Arizona, which some news organizations had already called for for the former vice president.
The Electoral College vote count, which will decide the race for the White House, was unchanged. Biden was still at 264 on the Associated Press tracker, which called Arizona for Biden, and Trump stayed at 214. They need 270 to win. The popular vote, which Biden leads by 4 million at this stage, doesn’t matter.
At some point in the night, with everything happening in the tally centers, on the streets and on television, Mick Mulvaney, Trump’s former chief of staff, injected a new element into the narrative. The president could lose this election, but he will not walk away and may run again in 2024. He attributed it to his former boss’s deep aversion to losing.
However, the fear of defeat had been overcome by a sense of despair in Trump’s world. The president’s eldest son, Don Trump Jr, demanded that Republicans who would be on the ballot in 2024 to join the president and support his wavering chances for re-election. His younger brother, Eric Trump, condescendingly thanked Republican Senator Lindsey Graham for “having courage.”
