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US PRESIDENT DONALD Trump said he will leave the White House if the Electoral College formalizes Joe Biden’s election victory.
But he insisted that decision would be a “mistake,” as he spent his Thanksgiving Day renewing unsubstantiated claims that “massive fraud” and corrupt officials in battlefield states caused his electoral defeat.
The fact that a sitting US president would even have to address whether or not he would leave office after losing re-election underscores the extent to which Trump has crushed one convention after another in the past three weeks.
While there is no evidence of the kind of widespread fraud that Trump has been alleging, he and his legal team have been working to cast doubt on the integrity of the election and trying to reverse the will of the voters in an unprecedented rule violation. .
Biden won by wide margins both in the Electoral College and in the popular vote, where he received nearly 80 million votes.
When asked if he would leave the building and allow a peaceful transition of power in January, Trump said: “I certainly will. But you know what.”
“This has a long way to go.”
The Trump administration has already given the green light for a formal transition to get underway, but it disagrees that Biden goes ahead.
But he has made it clear that he will likely never formally relent, even if he said he would leave the White House.
“It is going to be very difficult to admit. Because we know there was a massive fraud, “he said, noting that” time is not on our side.
When asked if he would attend Biden’s inauguration, Trump said he knew the answer but didn’t want to share it yet.
But there were some signs that Trump was coming to terms with his loss.
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At one point, he urged reporters not to allow Biden to take credit for pending coronavirus vaccines.
“Don’t let the vaccines take credit because the vaccines were me and I put more pressure on people than I ever have before,” he said.
As for whether or not he plans to formally declare his candidacy to run again in 2024, as he has discussed with his advisers, Trump did not “want to talk about 2024 just yet.”
All states must certify their results before the Electoral College meeting on December 14, and any challenge to the results must be resolved before January 8.
The state has already started that process, including Michigan, where Trump and his allies tried and failed to delay the process, and Georgia and Pennsylvania.
Voting certification at the local and state levels is often a ministerial task that receives little attention, but that changed this year with Trump’s refusal to budge and his unprecedented attempts to overturn election results through a barrage of challenges legal and attempts to manipulate the certification process in battlefield states that he lost.
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