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WASHINGTON (AP) – Increasingly detached from reality, President Donald Trump stood at a White House lectern and delivered a 46-minute rant against the election results which produced a victory for the Democrat Joe Biden, reversing one false statement after another to support his baseless claim that he really won.
Trump called his speech, posted on social media only on Wednesday and delivered to no audience, perhaps “the most important speech” of his presidency. But it was largely a recycling of the same litany of disinformation and unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud that he had been making for the past month.
Trump, who spoke from the diplomatic room, maintained his futile retaliation against the election even as state after state certifies his results and Biden continues to shape his cabinet ahead of his inauguration on Jan.20.
Trump’s remarks raised the question of how far he would be willing to go in his campaign to overturn Biden’s victory, including whether he could pressure Congressional Republicans to block certification of the vote. , a decision that was launched by the allies of the president.
Biden received a record 81 million votes compared to Trump’s 74 million. The Democrat also won 306 electoral votes against 232 for Trump. The Electoral College split corresponds to Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton four years ago, which he then described as a “landslide.”
Trump has dug deeper into his claim of a “rigged election” even though members of his own administration, including Attorney General William Barr, say no evidence of widespread electoral fraud has been uncovered. Courts in several battlefield states have launched a barrage of lawsuits on behalf of the president.
“It’s not just about honoring the votes of the 74 million Americans who voted for me,” Trump said. “It’s about making sure that Americans can have confidence in this election. And in all future elections.
In fact, his baseless claims have the opposite effect – undermining public confidence in the integrity of the US election.
About an hour after its publication, the Trump video had been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on Facebook and shared by more than 60,000 Facebook users. Facebook and Twitter have both flagged the president’s post as problematic, with Twitter noting that Trump’s allegations of voter fraud are disputed.
Julian Zelizer, professor of political history at Princeton University, said the nation has experienced close elections before – 1800, 1876 and, most recently, 2000. But this year’s election does not fit into that category.
“This is just a random and baseless attack on the entire election,” Zelizer said. “Trump has no turning point. I often say that there are parallels or precedents, but there are none in this case. It continues to sidestep the standards.
Trump has said election results should be “overturned immediately” in several battlefield states and suggested the Supreme Court intervene on his behalf, saying: “I hope they will do what is right. for our country because our country cannot live with this kind of situation. an election.”
But the Supreme Court is unlikely to intervene. No appeal for fraud has been filed with the High Court. Pennsylvania Republicans want judges to bar Biden’s state victory from being certified, but their appeal alleges Pennsylvania’s postal ballot law is unconstitutional and not fraudulent. The state Supreme Court has already dismissed the lawsuit.
Many of Trump’s claims have been repeatedly debunked in recent weeks.
His main claim: “This election is about a great electoral fraud, a fraud that has never been seen like this before.”
In fact, Christopher Krebs, director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency at the Department of Homeland Security, expressed confidence in the integrity of the elections ahead of the November vote. And later, he overturned allegations that the tally was tainted with fraud.
Krebs was sacked by Trump weeks ago.
Barr, in an interview with The Associated Press on Tuesday, said the Justice Department had found no evidence of widespread voter fraud. it could change the outcome of the election.
Trump, in his speech, addressed a series of baseless claims about voting in battlefield states including Pennsylvania, Michigan and beyond.
He alleged that in Pennsylvania, “large quantities of mail and mail ballots were processed illegally and in secret in Philadelphia and Allegheny County without the presence of our observers.”
In fact, no one tried to ban ballot observers representing each side of the election. And Democrats haven’t tried to prevent Republican officials from being able to watch the process.
The main problem was how close the observers representing the parties could relate to the election workers who processed the postal ballots in Philadelphia. The Trump campaign has sued to allow observers to move closer to the guidelines. A court ruled in favor of this request.
Trump also highlighted the high use of mail-in ballots this year, citing “the relentless pressure from the Democratic Party to print and mail tens of millions of ballots sent to unknown recipients without virtually no warranty of any kind.
In fact, postal ballots have a series of built-in safeguards to verify the identity of voters and prevent fraud.. Some states send ballots to every registered voter, while other states send ballots only to voters who request them. But the ballots are subject to that state’s verification requirements in either case.
The use of mail-in ballots has skyrocketed this year as Democrats encouraged their use to reduce in-person voting during a pandemic.
At another point, Trump presented a chart that followed the vote count in Wisconsin on election night and into the wee hours of the next day. He claimed that “a huge ballot dump” that happened at 3:42 am was suspicious.
In fact, Milwaukee election officials finished counting the city’s roughly 169,000 mail-in ballots around 3 a.m.
Wisconsin law requires that the results of these mail-in votes be reported all at once. The postal vote count was streamed live on YouTube for everyone to watch. Milwaukee Police escorted the city’s Chief Electoral Officer from a central enumeration point to the county courthouse to hand him USB drives with voting data.
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Madhani reported from Chicago. Associated Press editors Mark Sherman in Washington, Amanda Seitz in Chicago, and Ali Swenson in Seattle contributed to this report.
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