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US President Donald Trump has erupted in a tirade of unsubstantiated claims that he has been misled into not winning the US election.
His comments come as the vote tally in the battlefield states showed Democrat Joe Biden steadily closing in on victory.
“They’re trying to steal the election,” an increasingly isolated Trump said in a special appearance at the White House last night, two days after the polls closed.
Without providing evidence and afterward responding to journalists’ questions, Trump spent 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 counting ballots that authorities were prohibited from processing before Election Day.
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.
US President Donald Trump has erupted in a tirade of unsubstantiated claims that he has been tricked into not winning the US election | https://t.co/ORmjEYqa37 pic.twitter.com/BM0V1RwYX8
– RTÉ News (@rtenews) November 6, 2020
Complete 2020 U.S. Election Results
Representative Will Hurd called Trump’s call to stop the vote counting “dangerous and wrong,” while the New York Post, a longtime supporter of 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.
Biden, 77, was just one or at most two states on the battlefield from securing the 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 hit by Trump’s four-year polarization 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 very fine and rapidly fading 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 early lead was running out again.
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 votes needed for overall victory.
The latest results showed that Trump’s lead in the state had shrunk to less than 22,500 votes, and the majority of the ballots have yet to be counted from the Democratic stronghold of Philadelphia.
Protests across the country
Trump’s 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.
His team fanned out across the battlefield states challenging the results in court and his supporters converged outside the electoral offices in various cities.
Outside an election office in Phoenix, the Arizona capital, far-right conspiracy theorist Alex Jones roused a heavily armed crowd, shouting into a megaphone about Trump’s alleged enemies.
“They will be destroyed because the United States is rising,” he said.
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 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 aimed at creating 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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