Donald Trump publishes a speech on Facebook in which he repeats misinformation about the US elections

President Donald Trump has surprised the United States by posting a lengthy speech on his social media accounts, repeating a flood of unsubstantiated and disproven claims about last month’s presidential election.

The 46-minute prerecorded speech was filmed at the White House. Trump posted it unannounced shortly before 4 p.m. local time.

“This may be the most important speech I have ever made,” he tells the camera.

“I want to provide an update on our ongoing efforts to expose the tremendous electoral fraud and irregularities that took place during the ridiculously long elections on November 3.”

Joe Biden was declared the winner of the election on Saturday, November 7, four days after the polls closed.

The delay was caused by a relatively slow vote count in several swing states, specifically Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada.

A month after the election, Trump and his legal team have yet to provide evidence to back up their claims that widespread fraud robbed him of victory.

The president and his allies have suffered dozens of defeats in court. Judges have repeatedly called his claims not credible, without merit or without evidence.

“We used to have what we call Election Day. Now we have election weeks and months. And a lot of bad things happened during this time period,” Trump said in the prerecorded speech.

Especially when you have to prove almost nothing to exercise our greatest privilege, the right to vote.

“As President, I have no more duty than to uphold the laws and Constitution of the United States. That is why I am determined to protect our electoral system, which is now under coordinated assault and siege.

“During the months leading up to the elections, we were warned that we should not declare a premature victory. We were repeatedly told that it would take weeks, if not months, to determine the winner, count absentee ballots and verify the results.”

No one said it would take months to determine a winner. The warning from election experts, widely covered in the media, was that an increase in voting by mail due to the coronavirus pandemic meant that there might not be a clear result on election night.

Experts said that Trump and Biden would appear to be far ahead in certain states, depending on whether or not the state in question counted mail ballots (which are overwhelmingly Democratic) ahead of time.

They said these first clues would turn out to be a “mirage,” a blue in some states and a red in others.

This happened as planned in much of the country. In states like Florida and North Carolina, which allowed election officials to count the vote by mail before Election Day, Biden jumped to the top. Trump won both states.

In Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia, where officials had to wait until Election Day to start, Trump led by big margins early on and Biden eventually dragged him down.

The president declared victory on election night, before the majority of the mail-in votes in those states were counted, despite warnings from experts. Since then, he has argued that Biden’s return was suspicious and tainted by massive fraud.

He has also gone so far as to argue that Biden claimed victory prematurely.

“It was all very, very strange. Just days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint a winner even as many key states were still counted,” Trump continued.

“We are going to guarantee the honesty of the vote by making sure that every legal ballot is counted and that the illegal ballot is not counted.

“It’s not just about honoring the votes of the 74 million Americans who voted for me. It’s about ensuring that Americans have faith in this election and future ones.”

He went on to claim that the campaign “already has the evidence” it needs to prove its claims about fraud.

“This election was rigged. Everybody knows it,” Trump said.

“I don’t care if I lose an election. But I want to lose a fair and square election. What I don’t want to do is have it stolen from the American people.

“That is what we are fighting for, and we have no choice but to do so. We already have the proof, we already have the evidence, and it is very clear.

“Many people in the media, and even the judges so far, have refused to accept it. They know it’s true, they know it’s there, they know who won the election. But they refuse to say, ‘You’re right.’ Our country needs someone to say, ‘You’re right.’

The fundamental problem here is the dramatic disconnect between Trump’s claims in public and the claims of his lawyers in court, where they have not alleged a single specific case of voter fraud.

In Pennsylvania, the Trump campaign tried to prevent the state from certifying its results.

The head of Trump’s legal team, Rudy Giuliani, argued that case himself. When questioned by Judge Matthew Brann, he admitted that “it was not a case of fraud.”

Rather, the campaign has argued a patchwork of legal technicalities in an attempt to disqualify votes that favored Biden. For example, in that Pennsylvania case, he said that 680,000 Philadelphia ballots should be thrown out because Republican election watchers were unable to properly observe the count.

Incidentally, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court rejected that claim, saying that the treatment of observers by election officials was legal.

The closest the campaign has come to presenting evidence of actual fraud was in the form of affidavits signed by some of its observers.

Giuliani often says he has hundreds of these affidavits, although only a few have been filed in court. So far, they have failed to impress any of the judges.

For example, Judge Timothy Kenny ruled that about a half-dozen affidavits from Republican election observers in Michigan were “incorrect and not credible,” saying the people in question did not “fully understand” the vote counting process.

That’s polite judge speech for saying they had no idea what they were talking about. You can read Judge Kenny’s full decision here.

An Arizona judge rebuked Trump’s attorneys for the affidavits they had presented him, noting that they had requested witness testimony without verifying whether it was truly reliable.

Trump and Giuliani have been saying for weeks that they already have compelling and incontrovertible evidence. All this time after, none of that evidence has turned up in a courtroom.

In other words, the president accuses the judges, some of whom he himself appointed, of “refusing to accept” evidence that his lawyers have not even presented.

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