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Trump says he will leave White House if electoral college votes against him — video
A day after Pennsylvania’s highest court had thrown out a lower court’s order preventing the state from certifying results from the 3 November US elections, Donald Trump blasted the judges’ decision.
Saturday’s case – which had attempted to throw out 2.5m mail in votes in the crucial state – was the latest of dozens of failed lawsuits by Trump’s lawyers, with judges castigating his lawyers for failing to present evidence of fraud.
With states certifying results, Trump has an ever dwindling route to contest the election as Joe Biden pushes on with preparations for his inauguration as president on 20 January and recruits the team for his administration.
However, on Sunday in his first media appearance since losing the presidential contest to his Democratic rival, the president phoned into Fox News to blame the courts for his campaign’s so far unsuccessful legal challenges, which are based on a series of debunked conspiracies alleging widespread voter fraud.
“We’re not allowed to put in our proof. They say you don’t have standing,” Trump told Fox’s Sunday Morning Futures.
“We have affidavits, we have hundreds and hundreds of affidavits,” Trump added, noting he’d “file one nice, big beautiful lawsuit” without providing any details on the supposed “tremendous proof” attorneys have.
In the 20 days since polls closed, Republicans and Trump campaign officials have leaned into claims, without evidence, that some states allowed voters to turn in ballots after election day.
His interview comes after weeks of legal challenges from the Trump campaign in battleground states including Pennsylvania, where the underlying lawsuit was filed months after the law allowed for challenges to Pennsylvania’s year-old mail-in voting law.
The defeat on Saturday followed Friday’s decision by a federal appeals court to dismiss a separate challenge to the Pennsylvania result and back a district judge who likened the president’s evidence-free and error-strewn lawsuit to “Frankenstein’s monster”.
The president’s legal team, led by former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, had also demanded recounts in states like Georgia, Wisconsin and Michigan, alleging that vote-counting machines were rigged in an elaborate scheme in which even the justice department, FBI and the federal court system were complicit.
But none of these claims are true. In fact, Trump’s own legal team has never formally challenged elections results in any state court through substantiated claims of fraud.
According to the Washington Post, the last-ditch effort has attorneys within the campaign describing – Trump’s legal advisor as increasingly “deranged.” One close adviser told to The Post that Trump was like “Mad King George” going around the White House ‘muttering, “I won. I won. I won.”
Meanwhile, Milwaukee county completed its recount and certified its results on Friday, just 10 days after the Trump campaign filed a recount request for there and Dane county, the state’s two Democratic strongholds with large Black populations.
After nearly 400 uncounted ballots were found, Biden actually increased his margin of victory – gaining an 257 additional votes to the president’s 125 additional votes. Once Dane county certifies its results, the state will move forward in its final certification process.
In response, Trump tweeted that the recount was not an effort to find mistakes in the tally, but about “finding people who have voted illegally” – again invoking discredited conspiracies that his campaign has “found many illegal votes”.
The outgoing president has yet to concede the 2020 election, even as Biden, now president-elect, announces cabinet appointments and his agenda for his first 100 days in office.
After Biden crossed the 80m-vote threshold – a more than 6m vote lead – Trump demanded Biden prove that the votes he received in the election were not “illegally obtained”, which there is no legal requirement of any winning official to do before taking office.
There have been a number or reports, based on anonymous official sources, that Trump is weighing up a run in the 2024 presidential election, including a report by the Daily Beast that he is thinking of announcing his campaign during Biden’s inauguration.
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