ABC, CBS and NBC parted ways with President Donald Trump on Thursday as he spoke from the White House to make an unfounded accusation that he was stealing the presidential election.
Trump had tried to take over the nation’s airwaves at a time when late-night news broadcasts on the East Coast, after a day when slow vote counting revealed his tracks in Pennsylvania and Georgia were waning.
MSNBC’s Brian Williams also interrupted the president. Fox News Channel and CNN aired the president’s entire speech, after which CNN’s Anderson Cooper said Trump was “like an obese turtle on his back, flailing in the blazing sun as he realized his time was up.”
Network personalities had harshly criticized Trump after his angry speech in the middle of the night after Election Day, but they broadcast that speech in its entirety. Trump was more dovish on Thursday, but offered a litany of complaints about “suppression” polls, mail-in ballots and fraud that he never specified.
“We have to interrupt here, because the president has made a number of false statements, including the idea that there have been fraudulent votes,” said NBC’s Lester Holt. “There has been no evidence of that.”
CBS’s Norah O’Donnell stepped in to ask correspondent Nancy Cordes to verify Trump’s claim that if “legal votes” were counted, he would easily win the election. Cordes said there is no indication of a substantial number of illegal votes cast, and said Trump’s reference to late votes is “another falsehood.”
MSNBC parted ways with Trump to introduce Brian Williams.
“Here we are again in the unusual position of not only interrupting the president of the United States but correcting the president of the United States,” he said. “There are no illegal votes that we know of, there has been no Trump victory that we know of.”
After ABC ended its coverage, the network’s White House correspondent Jonathan Karl also said there was no evidence of illegal votes.
“What seems to frustrate him is that it takes time to count the votes,” Karl said. “It always takes time to count the votes. But especially in this election. “
As CNN kept Trump on the air, a chyron displayed below him said, “Without any evidence, Trump says they are misleading him.”
Anchor Jake Tapper looked tired when he finished.
“What a sad night for the United States of America to hear its president say that, falsely accuse people of trying to steal elections, trying to attack democracy in that way with this party of falsehoods,” he said. lie after lie. Pathetic.”
CNN analysts David Axelrod and Van Jones said they were angered by Trump’s attacks on authorities in Detroit and Philadelphia, suggesting they amounted to racism.
On Fox News Channel, commentators Bill Bennett and Byron York said that just because Trump did not allege specific cases of wrongdoing does not mean there were none. But the president and his lawyers must present evidence, they added.
“What we saw tonight is a president who believes that at the end of the day, when all the votes are counted, the election will not go his way, so he is trying to plan an alternative route to retain the White House,” he said. Fox’s White House correspondent John Roberts.
The New York Post, a prominent Trump media ally, titled an article on the speech: “Donald Trump Makes Unsubstantiated Claims of Election Fraud in White House Speech.”
John Dickerson of CBS News said Trump’s speech “felt like a deflated recitation.”
The third day of election coverage on the networks was like a high school math class, filled with numbers fanatics like MSNBC’s Steve Kornacki and CNN’s John King explaining the complexities of the votes being reported.
With Biden cutting off Trump’s tracks in states crucial to any chance of the president getting the necessary 270 electoral votes, it was unlike any kind of math in the sense that he was building toward a grand finale.
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