WashingtonPresident Donald Trump erupted into a tirade of unsubstantiated claims that he had been misled into not winning the US election, as the vote count in the battle states early Friday showed Democrat Joe Biden steadily closing in on victory.
“They are trying to steal the election,” an increasingly isolated Trump said in an extraordinary appearance at the White House on Thursday, two days after the polls closed.
Trump did not provide evidence or answer questions from journalists afterward, spending nearly 17 minutes making the kind of inflammatory statements about the country’s democratic process that had never been heard from a US president before.
According to Trump, the Democrats were using “illegal votes” to “steal our elections.”
“If you count the legal votes, I win easily,” he said. “They are trying to manipulate an election. And we cannot allow that to happen.”
Trump’s rhetoric came as his campaign aggressively challenged the integrity of the large number of ballots sent by mail, rather than being cast in person on Election Day.
The big shift to postal ballots this year reflected voters’ desire to avoid the risk of exposure to Covid-19 in crowded polling stations during a pandemic that has already killed an estimated 235,000 Americans.
With Trump accusing fraud, mail ballots have leaned heavily toward Democrats. In the crucial state of Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign moved to stop the counting of ballots that authorities were prohibited from processing before Election Day.
Mixed support for Trump
Several major US television networks cut live coverage of Trump’s event over misinformation concerns and there were signs of cracks in support within his Republican Party.
Representative Will Hurd called Trump’s call to stop the vote counting “dangerous and wrong,” while the New York Post, which has long supported Rupert Murdoch, called Trump’s accusations “unfounded.”
But prominent Republicans joined Trump, noting that they could challenge the legitimacy of the results if the president loses.
“I think everything should be on the table,” Sen. Lindsey Graham said when Fox News anchor and Trump loyalist Sean Hannity asked whether Pennsylvania’s Republican-led legislature should decline to certify the results.
The 77-year-old Biden was just one or, at most, two states on the battlefield from getting a majority to take the White House. Trump, 74, needed an increasingly unlikely combination of victories in various states to stay in power.
Biden, who has vowed to heal a country battered by Trump’s four extraordinarily polarizing years in power, called for “the people to remain calm.”
“We have no doubt that when the count is over, Senator (Kamala) Harris and I will be declared the winners,” he told reporters in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware.
“The process is working,” he said. “The count is being completed. And we will know soon.”
Biden comes closer
In Georgia, a generally Republican state, Trump had a slim and rapidly disappearing lead of around 1,800 votes.
In Arizona and Nevada, Biden kept few leads. If Biden wins both states, he would win the presidency.
But the biggest piece of the puzzle was Pennsylvania, where Trump’s head start was again steadily running out.
Currently, the Democratic candidate is projected to have 253 of the 538 electoral college votes spread across the nation’s 50 states. It has 264 with the inclusion of Arizona, which Fox News and the Associated Press have called in its favor, but other major organizations have not.
If Biden took Pennsylvania, he would get 20 more votes from the electoral college, instantly surpassing the 270 needed for overall victory.
The latest results showed that Trump’s lead in the state had shrunk to less than 22,500 votes, and most of the ballots yet to be counted come from the Democratic stronghold of Philadelphia.
Protests across the country
The Trump campaign insisted the president has a way of winning, citing pockets of Republican support that have yet to be counted and also claiming massive fraud without providing proof.
Trump’s team fanned out across the battlefield states challenging the results in court, and his supporters converged outside election offices in various cities.
Outside an election office in Phoenix, the Arizona capital, far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones roused a heavily armed crowd and yelled over a megaphone about Trump’s alleged enemies: “They will be destroyed because America is on the rise. “.
In Las Vegas, red-hatted Trump supporters from “Make America Great Again” demanded that the ballots be processed.
Brando Madrigal said he wanted to verify that the votes “do not come from people who died with Covid, people who are out of the state, people who do not have the possibility to vote because they do not have the papers.”
But while Trump demanded that the count be stopped in Georgia and Pennsylvania, where he leads, his supporters and his campaign insisted that he continue in Arizona and Nevada, where he lags behind.
Bob Bauer, a lawyer for Biden’s campaign, dismissed the large number of lawsuits as “without merit.”
“All of this is meant to create a big cloud,” Bauer said. “But it is not a very thick cloud. We see through it. Also the courts and election officials.”
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