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Donald Trump has no intention of admitting defeat in the U.S. presidential election or offering Joe Biden his concession, his campaign insisted on Monday.
“That word is not even in our vocabulary right now,” Jason Miller, a senior campaign adviser, told Fox Business.
Trump has initiated a series of lawsuits to file allegations of electoral fraud and corruption for which he has not presented evidence. State officials say they are not aware of any significant wrongdoing.
Biden surpassed the 270 electoral college vote threshold required to win the White House on Saturday. He beat Trump by more than 4.3 million votes nationwide as Trump became the first president in 28 years to lose his re-election bid.
Biden delivered a victory speech in Wilmington, Delaware, on Saturday, and then presented a task force on the coronavirus on Monday.
Traditionally, the losing candidate calls and congratulates the winner, then delivers a concession speech that seeks to unite the country. But far from cooperating in a transition, Trump continues to falsely argue that he is the rightful winner and promises that his team will fight to the end in court, posing long-term challenges in several states.
In his interview with Fox Business, Miller said: “We are going to look at all these legal means, all the counting methods. We will continue to expose and investigate all of these cases of fraud or abuse, and we will ensure that the American public can have full confidence in these elections. “
Miller said he expected counts in Georgia and Arizona, legal action in Michigan and Wisconsin, and enough evidence to challenge the result in Pennsylvania.
The legal offensive has so far failed, and judges have thrown out the court cases for lack of evidence. The Trump campaign published a dozen emails Monday seeking donations for an “official electoral defense fund.” But there was no indication that any new strategy would work better.
In a separate interview, Tim Murtaugh, Trump’s campaign communications director, told Fox Business: “We have great confidence that as the president follows his lines of legal recourse, including the stories in Georgia and Wisconsin, at least We feel like there is a catwalk for the president to win this and win re-election ”.
Murtaugh dismissed reports that Trump plans to hold campaign-style rallies to boost counts, but promised “grassroots events” such as boat parades to protest Biden’s victory, explaining: “People are upset.”
There is no evidence of vote counting fraud, culminating in media networks announcing Biden as the winner.
Trump’s unlikely position against reality seemed to divide both his White House and the Republican Party.
His son-in-law Jared Kushner, attorney Rudy Giuliani and Miller are reportedly urging the president to continue to push hard for the stories. White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and his assistant David Bossie are said to encourage him to consider throwing in the towel.
Melania Trump, the first lady, tweeted Sunday: “The American people deserve fair elections. Every legal vote, not illegal, must be counted. We must protect our democracy with total transparency ”.
Trump’s dominance over his party is such that only a small number have publicly acknowledged defeat. Among them are the party’s only living former president, George W. Bush, its defeated 2012 candidate, Mitt Romney, and two other senators, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine.
By a Washington Post tally, only eight Republicans in the House of Representatives have described Biden as the winner. Most of the party has endorsed Trump’s effort to pursue legal options or endorsed his conspiracy theories.
Pat Toomey, a Republican senator from Pennsylvania, told CBS News’ Face the Nation on Sunday: “Seventy million Americans voted for Donald Trump, and they and the president deserve to see this process happen. Now, I understand that yesterday the media projected how this is going to end and the media projection is probably correct. But there is a reason we really do the count. “
There was a hint on Monday that the president might give in to the inevitable when the Axios website reported that he had “already told the advisers that he was considering running for president again in 2024.”
Trump would be eligible to run because presidents can serve two terms that do not have to be consecutive. It garnered more than 70 million votes this year, a strong show of resistance. In 2024 he will be 78 years old, the age Biden will reach this month.
Trump’s intransigence has raised fears of a bumpy transition, with little sign that he has invited Biden to the White House in the way that Barack Obama met him shortly after his shocking 2016 victory.
The General Services Administration is responsible for formally recognizing Biden as president-elect, initiating the transition, but the agency’s Trump-appointed administrator, Emily Murphy, has not initiated the process or given guidance on when she will do so. .
During the election, Trump refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power and it is unclear whether he will instruct his staff to cooperate with the incoming team, as custom demands.
Jen Psaki, Biden’s transition assistant, tweeted: “The national security and economic interests of the United States depend on the federal government clearly and quickly indicating that the United States government will respect the will of the American people and participate in a transfer of Peaceful and smooth power. “
The non-partisan Center for Presidential Transition advisory board urged the Trump administration to “immediately begin the post-election transition process and the Biden team to make the most of the resources available under the Presidential Transition Act.”
Trump will remain president for more than two months. In a sign that business is continuing as usual on Monday, he fired his defense secretary Mark Esper, while his housing secretary Ben Carson was revealed to have tested positive for Covid-19 after attending a well-attended party. election in the White House.
